Kim Kardashian’s Former Assistant Stephanie Shepherd Finally Set the Record Straight on Her 2017 Firing

Stephanie Shepherd, who previously served as Kim Kardashian’s assistant for four years, put lingering rumors about her 2017 firing to rest in a new interview. At the time the split seemed to suggest Shepherd’s interpersonal relationship with her friend and former boss had soured. But during an October 23 appearance on The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast, Shepherd offered a very different take on how her termination went down.

“I just inherently felt like, ‘It is time to move on. I don’t know if I have anything more I can contribute to this,’” Shepherd explained. “I think she probably felt that and saw that.”

Shepherd even went so far as to call their professional split “the most beautiful uncoupling,” and recalled both of them crying during the fateful conversation.

“She’s like, ‘I want you to [thrive]. You need something more. You have this thing—pursue that. I’m supporting you [with] whatever you need,’” Shepherd said, paraphrasing Kim Kardashian’s words.

Today the two remain friends.

“We have never been closer,” Shepherd went on. “She is still someone that I go to for personal and professional advice all the time. But I think it was just that feeling inside where I was like, Okay, it’s time for me to move on. And I didn’t really have a plan. But I just knew that it was time for me to try something different.”

Shepherd, who cofounded the environmental nonprofit Future Earth after leaving her former boss, also equated working for Kardashian to earning a master’s degree.

“It’s a machine, and it is meticulous,” Sheperd noted of the influencer family’s inner workings. “I always say it is my graduate school. Because I learned everything that I know about sending an email to an agent or speaking to a manager or booking glam or finding a photographer or dealing with product development or working with a publicist. Every single step of everything that you have to know about being an entrepreneur in the entertainment business, I learned from working under Kim.”