Before the world began keeping up with her family’s antics, before the fragrance lines and before the magazine covers, Kim Kardashian was famous for the infamous. But now, five years since her sex tape with ex-boyfriend Ray J was released, the reality star says she understands the impact it’s had on her career.

“Would you be where you are had there not been a sex tape?”Oprah Winfrey asked Kardashian on Sunday’s Oprah’s Next Chapter.

“You know, I think that’s how I was definitely introduced to the world,” Kardashian, 31, said of the sex tape, which was the focus of a lawsuit until she settled with Vivid Entertainment to distribute it. “It was a negative way, so I felt like I really had to work 10 times harder to get people to see the real me.”

When it was released, she said, she turned to her mom, panicked. It was a “really bad day” mom Kris Jenner recalls. “No mother ever wants to hear something like that,” Jenner said earlier in the interview. “I could tell she was in a lot of pain.” Still, she told her daughter, “We can get through anything.”

Today, Kim says she embraces the sex tape that jump-started her fame, as well as her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries, as parts of her life: ”I have to live with the choices I have made,” she said. “And I can’t dwell on it.”

Are you a Kim Kardashian fan? Could she have achieved the same degree of fame and success without her infamous sex tape?

Source: People

Image: Damsels