In an unlikely series of events, a Kim Kardashian photo at the 2018 Met Gala allowed a stolen Egyptian artifact to be returned to its country of origin after it was stolen and smuggled out of the Middle Eastern nation.
Kim Kardashian, wearing a gold dress during the 2018 Met Gala, was photographed next to the golden coffin of Nedjemankh, which was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $4 million using falsified documents regarding its origin, according to the New York Post.
The coffin, dating back to the first century BCE, was found during the 2011 Arab Spring revolution which deposed then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Dug up in the al-Minya region of Egypt, it was sent to Hassan Fazeli, an antiquities dealer in the U.A.E.
Fazeli mislabeled the tomb as a Greco-Roman artifact to cover up where the coffin came from, and then sold it to Roben Dib of the Dionysos Gallery in Hamburg, Germany, who constructed a fake Egyptian export license that claims that it was exported to the museum in 1971.
Later on, French antiquities scholar and dealer Christophe Kunicki and Richard Semper acquired the tomb, which they then sold to the Met for $4 million. After the Kim Kardashian photograph was released, an anonymous informant flagged the tomb as stolen.
The artifact was returned to Egypt in 2019 by the Met, and Roben Dib was arrested in August 2020. He maintains that the export documents used on the tomb are legitimate.
Kim Kardashian recently went to the 2021 Met Gala wearing a Balenciaga ensemble that covered her entire body and her face. It is reminiscent of her ex-husband Kanye West’s masked outfits that he wore during the promotion of his new album "Donda," according to Glamour.
Kim Kardashian has yet to comment about her unexpected role in the return of the stolen Egyptian artifact.
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