LOS ANGELES—Former Playboy model and reality star Kim Kardashian and her mother, Kris Jenner, suffered a major legal setback in a legal battle to prevent the release of a 2023 settlement with R&B artist William Raymond Norwood Jr., better known as Ray J, that would expose details about his and Kardashian's infamous 2007 sex tape leaked to Vivid Entertainment.
Tabloids reported on Wednesday that a judge at the Los Angeles Superior Court denied a request to seal certain court documents, including the noted settlement. As TMZ reported, the judge ruled that Kardashian and Jenner were unable to present enough evidence that making the settlement available to the public would cause potential harm.
As AVN previously reported, Ray J filed a countersuit in November 2025 alleging that Kardashian and Jenner had breached a $6 million settlement agreement into which they entered with him over the sex tape, and that the three parties had worked together to release the sex tape consensually.
The judge recently found that the bid from Kardashian and Jenner was “too vague, speculative, amorphous, and unsupported to support the requested sealing order.” Court documents filed on behalf of Ray J note that both "are furious that Norwood no longer wants to play along with their tall tale."
Ray J maintains in his lawsuit that he, Kardashian and Jenner agreed to sign a licensing agreement with Vivid Entertainment to release the sex tape in 2007. The suit goes on to allege, "Kardashian, Jenner, and Vivid agreed that Kardashian would file a bogus lawsuit" in which she would claim that she did not "intend, authorize or consent" to the distribution of the sex tape.
All of this was done, according to Ray J, to create buzz about the sex tape's release. He also insists that claims filed against Vivid were simply "lies" and accuses Kardashian and Jenner of leaking news of a false $5 million settlement with the studio to TMZ.
Legal documents also note that “Kardashian begged ... [Ray J] ... to go along with yet another false ‘story' that she wanted to run on [reality show The Kardashians]: that they were working with Vivid to remove the sex tape from the internet."
Claims of the false narrative by Kardashian and Jenner surrounding the sex tape stem from a book by Canadian investigative journalist Ian Halperin, released in April 2016. The book is titled
