LOS ANGELES (AP) — Corey Gamble, a key witness for the Kardashians, insisted Wednesday that he saw Blac Chyna punch Rob Kardashian and whip him with a phone-charging cord, as Chyna’s lawyer tried to poke holes in his story.
“I said that she attacked him,” Gamble, the longtime boyfriend and sometime co-star of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” matriarch Kris Jenner, told the jury during a trial in a Los Angeles courtroom. “What I saw is what I saw.”
Chyna is suing Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, alleging they conspired to get her show “Rob & Chyna” canceled and ruin her reality TV career. Chyna alleges they defamed her when they told executives at the E! network that she physically assaulted her then-fiancé Rob Kardashian.
Gamble, 41, is the lone third-party eye witness to describe any assault. He testified late Tuesday that on the morning of Dec. 15, 2016, Kris Jenner got an emergency call from her son Rob Kardashian, and when she put the phone on speaker he could hear Chyna screaming obscenities at him.
He said he would not allow Kris Jenner to go to the couple’s home, and instead rushed there himself.
When he arrived, he said, Chyna was holding some sort of metal rod, and threw it down. She rushed toward Rob Kardashian, whipping the phone cord at him then punching him.
“By the time she got to him, she started hitting him,” Gamble testified. ”I was able to get in the middle of them two. I even got hit two or three times. And I was able to get him away, get them separated. I told him to get his keys and his wallet and get the hell out of there.”
Gamble said Chyna threw a chair at Rob Kardashian’s car as he was leaving, then attempted to pick up a table but Gamble stopped her.
During cross-examination Wednesday, Chyna’s lawyer Lynne Ciani had Gamble, who wore a black suit with a white shirt on the stand, read from a declaration he submitted in the case two years earlier, in which he said he arrived to find Chyna hitting Rob Kardashian with her fists, but made no mention of any of the objects.
“You didn’t see sufficient to mention the metal rod, the cord or the table?” Ciani asked.
“I don’t know why I didn’t include those details,” Gamble said.
“You told the jury that there was much more going on than Chyna allegedly hitting Rob,” Ciani said.
“Life don’t happen in slow motion, things happen fast and quick, it was a hostile situation,” Gamble said. “Anything you do to slow it down don’t change the fact that the attack happened.”
Accounts of the night of Dec. 14, 2016, and the following morning have been pivotal at the trial.
Chyna testified that she and Rob Kardashian were celebrating the news that their “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” spinoff “Rob & Chyna” was getting a second season. The all-night celebration turned into a bitter fight by morning, when he took her phone and shut himself in a closet, looking for evidence of communications with other men, she said.
She insists that what Gamble saw was her angrily attempting to get her phone back.
She said that earlier she had wrapped a phone-charging cord around Rob Kardashian’s neck playfully because he was ignoring her, and picked up his gun from a nightstand as a joke.
The chain of events would lead to the end of the relationship, and the show.
The role the other Kardashians had in spreading the news of the alleged assault, and getting the show canceled, is the central subject of the trial.
Kim Kardashian testified Tuesday that she had no recollection of telling E! executives Chyna had assaulted her brother, nor of telling her sisters to spread the word.
She acknowledged after being shown text messages from the time that she sought to keep Chyna off “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” on which Chyna occasionally appeared, and threatened to keep her family from appearing if she was included.
“I will not go into a toxic work environment,” Kardashian said. “On my own show, I have the power to do that.”
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