Khloé Kardashian says she rejected a marriage proposal from NBA star Tristan Thompson.
In the latest episode, which dropped Thursday, “The Kardashians” star revealed that Thompson, the father of her two children who has been embroiled in cheating scandals, popped the question in December 2020. But she turned him down because she “wasn’t comfortable” accepting his proposal at the time.
“I said I need to make sure this is a totally different relationship because I want to be proud to say I’m engaged to anyone, and that’s why I said I’m not comfortable accepting this right now because I’m not excited to tell my family,” Kardashian said in a confessional for the episode of the Hulu reality series. “And as hurtful as that probably was for him to hear, it was the truth. I’m not ever gonna accept something and give someone false hope, and I said that to him.”
Kardashian, 38, who welcomed a son with Thompson, 31, via surrogate in August, called their situation humiliating and hurtful. The two have been together on and off since 2016. They welcomed their first child, a daughter named True, in 2018, and in last week’s episode, Kardashian explained how finding out that he cheated on her 48 hours before True was born caused her stress and sent her into early labor.
But, she said, she carried on with the relationship despite “a couple bumps in the road” because she thought the two of them “were really good.”
“Going through what I went through with Tristan was incredibly hard,” she said in the new episode. “The hardest part about it all was training yourself to un-love someone. This was my life for six years and we weren’t just a couple, we genuinely were best friends. We did all these things together and learning how to undo all those things, that takes time. Just because someone does you dirty, doesn’t mean you fall out of love with them instantly.”
The Good American co-founder opened up about the marriage proposal to her elder sister Kim Kardashian, who encouraged her to open up to the rest of the family after they expressed concern that she was getting too skinny. Khloe said that she had been stressed but dealing with issues alone, explaining that she and Thompson were “in the best place” in their relationship before the latest cheating scandal erupted. (The new episode was filmed six months before last week’s premiere episode, which chronicled the bombshell news that Thompson was having a baby with another woman days after the couple implanted an embryo in their surrogate).
“The fact that he proposed and you never told us and I asked him months later, the night I thought it happened, he’s like, ‘She never told you guys?’” Kim Kardashian said. Khloe also confirmed to a producer on-camera that Thompson had indeed proposed.
Kim said she thought Thompson would propose on Valentine’s Day 2021, but when she asked him about it the next day, Thompson told her that he proposed in December.
In December 2021, news broke that model Maralee Nichols filed a paternity suit against Thompson alleging that Thompson conceived a child with her. In January of this year, he confirmed that he was the father of Nichols’ son, who was born in December, and publicly apologized to Khloe Kardashian.
“When we’re in the peak of our relationship, you go ahead and cheat on me?” she told Kim. “I don’t even want to know what you do in the worst of our relationship. I’m just like shame on me, almost. I know better, and I didn’t do better because I had so much hope and faith.”
New episodes of “The Kardashians” come out every Thursday on Hulu.