A reality show scene where Kim Kardashian’s son finds an advert for a sex tape on the game Roblox was not faked, a source close to the star says.
In the scene, Saint West, six, shows his mother a “Kim Kardashian experience” room he apparently stumbled across while playing the game.
Roblox said it removed the room and banned its creator – and no sex tape was ever available.
It also said only “a few dozen players” found it in the short time it was live.
‘Actively searched’
On social media and in some news reports, people have suggested the chances of Saint West being one of those who found it are slim.
One well known independent Roblox developer known as Zomebody told BBC News: “The chances of ‘accidentally’ stumbling upon a game like that are astronomically small.
“There are two potential ways for Saint to have found such a game – either he or the family actively searched for (or even created) such a game or someone else in their group of peers created it and then shared it directly with the boy.”
Neither the Kardashians nor the production company, Fulwell 73, provided an on-the-record comment but a source close to the family insisted the scene was not falsified.
Fifty million players worldwide log in to Roblox every day to explore, play mini-games and create their own experiences.
There are millions of player-generated experiences and mini games, with new features added daily.
The most popular experiences are showcased to Roblox players through a curated home screen but others can be found using the search function.
The vast majority of these zones are not advertised to players and do not receive many visitors.
The moment Saint West finds the Roblox room is a central driver of the drama in the first episode of the new show, The Kardashians, a reboot of the long-running Keeping Up With the Kardashian’s reality show.
He is seen running up to his mother, saying: “Everybody look it, this is on Roblox,” before handing her his tablet computer.
The tablet screen is blurred but Kim Kardashian describes what she saw to an interviewer: “There was a picture of my cry face and I look at it and it said something super-inappropriate like, ‘Kim’s new sex tape’. This is supposed to be unreleased footage from my old sex tape.”
A sex tape of Kim Kardashian was published online in 2007.
Later in the episode, using strong language, she threatens to sue Roblox telling her lawyer she has “all the time, all the money and all the resources to burn them to the… ground”.
‘So grateful’
Roblox, which is valued at about $24bn (£18bn), said it took action against the content as soon as its moderators were alerted in September 2021.
The show aired on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere, last week.
There is no public record of a lawsuit filed against the company.
A Roblox spokesman said: “The text reference to the tape that got around our filters was quickly taken down and fortunately visible only to a few dozen people on the platform. We also swiftly took down the associated experience and banned the community developer involved with the incident.”
Roblox would not say who had created the room, exactly how many players had entered it before it had been removed or how the company had been notified about it.
Hulu, which did not respond to requests for comment, celebrated the success of the show, which had the biggest US premiere in the streaming service’s history.
Kim Kardashian wrote on Instagram she was “so grateful for you all for tuning in