Kanye West is opening up about the terrifying moment his wife Kim Kardashian West was held at gunpoint and robbed in her Paris hotel room in 2016.
In a nearly two-hour interview with Charlamagne Tha God from iHeartRadio’s The Breakfast Club that was released on Tuesday, the rapper candidly spoke about everything from his mental breakdown and how he was able to pull through to the details surrounding Kardashian West’s traumatic experience in Paris.
“The situation with my wife in Paris — and all of the elements, you’re feeling like helpless, you’re feeling like what else can you do,” West, 40, told the radio personality. “I went to Paris on that trip to protect her. Not protect her physically, but to go and just help her with her looks ‘cause she’s in Paris.”
He added, “One of the things that she said that she heard was that they were coming to rob her and they had to wait til’ I had left. The people had been strategizing and scheming on that for a long time. So when she finally got to Paris by herself, they were like, ‘Okay, this is our chance.’ The robbery — I don’t know where that came from. Was there a bigger plan, a bigger set up?”
On Oct. 3, 2016, the Keeping Up with the Kardashians star was robbed at gunpoint at the No Address Hotel during Paris Fashion Week, when masked men stole millions of dollars worth of jewelry from her in the middle of the night — including a $4 million ring.
Multiple sources confirmed to PEOPLE that the star was deeply shaken by the experience, and following the robbery, Kardashian West, 37, immediately returned to the United States and retreated entirely from the spotlight — both physically and digitally.
“She has zero desire to resume her old life,” a source told PEOPLE. “She’s still figuring out what she wants to do. Her whole life has basically changed. Before, she was like a social butterfly — now she’s much more withdrawn.”
With Kardashian West’s robbery and West’s health crisis, rumors of divorce began to circulate, however, the duo seemed to power through the storm.
“They seem to be doing much better,” a source told PEOPLE in February 2017, adding that Kardashian West seemed “much happier.”
“They’re having fun together again,” the source said. “The struggles that they had for the past few months seem to have mostly past.”
In his interview with Charlamagne, West said he no longer sees a therapist, but rather, “I use the words as my therapy. Anyone I talk to is my therapist. I will pull them into the conversation of what I’m feeling at that point and get their perspective.”
Earlier this month, the “Saint Pablo” singer returned to Twitter with a series of troubling tweets , but Kardashian West was quick to defend her husband in a series of tweets of her own, arguing that reports labeling him “as having mental health issues for just being himself when he has always been expressive” are “not fair.”
“He’s a free thinker, is that not allowed in America?” she said. “Because some of his ideas differ from yours you have to throw in the mental health card? That’s just not fair. He’s actually out of the sunken place when he’s being himself which is very expressive.”
And West feels similarly.
“I like the way my wife communicates, documents things,” West told Charlemagne. “As an artist I think it’s good to document ourselves, document our now, see if we can recognize ourselves in a different light, in a different life.”