LOS ANGELES – Kris Jenner testified Thursday that she was happy when she heard her son Rob Kardashian was engaged to his new girlfriend Blac Chyna despite stories of violence and volatility about her.
"I just wanted my son to be happy," the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” matriarch said from the witness stand in a Los Angeles courtroom. “They had a rocky relationship from the start, and I just wanted really a win for them.”
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Jenner was the first of four defendants — a group that also includes her daughters Kim Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian and Kylie Jenner — to testify in Blac Chyna's $100 million lawsuit alleging the women conspired to have her reality show “Rob & Chyna” canceled and damage her celebrity status.
In her questioning, Chyna's lawyer Lynne Ciani attempted to cast Kris Jenner as having prejudicial feelings toward Chyna from the start over stories she had heard about Chyna's relationship with rapper Tyga, who dated Kylie Jenner immediately after.
Kris Jenner said she had heard from her daughter and Tyga that Chyna had physically abused Tyga and had at one point threatened to kill Kylie Jenner.
Ciani asked her why she didn't go to police or do more to intervene after these stories.
“I wasn’t that concerned. There were all kinds of things going on,” Kris Jenner said. “There was just a lot of drama, which I’m used to in my family.”
Kim and Khloé Kardashian, who are also slated to testify, watched their mother's testimony from the front row of the gallery. Kylie Jenner has attended the trial all week but was not present Thursday.
When called to the stand in the afternoon, Kris Jenner, who was wearing an aqua-blue suit, removed the face mask she had been wearing while sitting in the gallery and put on her glasses.
Ciani asked Kris Jenner why she reacted happily when she first heard in 2016 that her son was getting engaged to this woman, and had the same reaction when she heard the two were having a baby.
“People change,” Kris Jenner said. “You want to give people a second chance. You hoped for the best, and we moved on.”
Kris Jenner would be an executive producer on the couple's “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” spinoff, “Rob & Chyna," which premiered later in September of 2016.
Asked whether she had prevented footage dealing with her son's depression from being shown because it was “too dark," Jenner said she couldn't recall. She said she may have had the ability to do as much when scenes were first shot, but she had no control once it reached the network.
Ciania asked whether Kris Jenner had ever told Jeff Jenkins, an executive from the E! Network, which aired both shows, that she was not happy with her son's choice of Chyna as a fiancee.
“I may have said something like that when they were fighting or in an argument, because that’s how I was feeling that day,” Kris Jenner said.
The testimony then turned to the key day of Dec. 15, 2016, when Chyna and Rob Kardashian had a fight that would lead to her moving out of their home and the end of their relationship. Much of Chyna's testimony Wednesday dealt with the fight, and the celebration of the show's renewal the night before. Chyna testified that she was joking with her fiance when she wrapped a phone cord around his neck and grabbed his unloaded gun off a nightstand.
Kris Jenner testified that she couldn't remember whether Rob or Chyna first called her that morning.
“It was chaotic, it was a mess, it was crazy, and they were both very upset,” she said. “I was extremely upset because they were extremely upset.”
She testified that she meant to go intervene but that her boyfriend Corey Gamble, who will testify later in the trial, wouldn't let her.
“I said I’m going right over, and Corey said ‘No you’re not, I’m going over there,' ” Kris Jenner said.
The day's testimony ended there. Kris Jenner was to return to the stand on Friday.
Chyna's lawsuit, filed in 2017, alleges defamation and interference with contracts. It accuses Kris Jenner of being a ringleader who used her daughters in a campaign to defame Chyna as abusive to Rob Kardashian.
Two other defendants, Kourtney Kardashian and Kendall Jenner, were dismissed from the case during the run-up to trial.
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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton