Today, a family are standing around a hospital bed, willing a man back to life.

Yes, the hospital is in Las Vegas, and the family are among the most famous in the world.

Yes, the airport than runs alongside the infamous Vegas Strip is choked with private jets as sports stars like Kobe Bryant fly in to join the vigil.

Yes, doctors that only the mega-rich can afford are being employed, and a horde of journalists and photographers are camped outside in the 33-degree heat, waiting to snatch an image of a famous face contorted in emotion, a heated argument, a comforting embrace.

Right now, medical professionals in that hospital, as well as an army of nurses, florists, cleaners, wardens and cooks will be fielding bribes for skerricks of information about what’s going on in one room, in one bed, of their facility.

That’s because the man in the bed is Lamar Odom.

Lamar Odom via Getty.

He is a famous basketball player. But that’s not why the cameras are there. The cameras are there, and the bribes are being offered, and his status was even reported on this morning’s Australian ABC news report, because he was once married to a Kardashian.

But is that also the reason he is in the hospital bed? Did his association with a family well known for selling everything to the highest bidder ultimately land him at a brothel in country Nevada, foaming at the mouth after a three-day sex and narcotic binge?

Did his short marriage to Khloe Kardashian inevitably end with him in a coma, suffering multiple strokes, with his kidneys failing?

Plenty say yes. Today in the Daily Mail Piers Morgan wrote that Lamar should never have had tried to “Keep up with the Kardashians”.

Lamar Odom with the Kardashian family.

There are entire websites devoted to ‘Men Who Have Had Their Lives Ruined By The Kardashians’ where Lamar’s name appears next to Kim Kardashian’s ex-husband, Chris Humphries, her hapless brother Rob and of course Scott Disick who has recently left his family after succumbing to his long struggle with alcoholism.

And there are a hundred tabloid covers that paint Khloe and her sisters as vampiric man-slayers, emasculating rich powerful men left, right and centre.

Post continues after gallery:

tabloids

Can it be true that these women – this clan of strong females led by their matriarch who together are worth more than $300million – are trampling through the lives of these poor innocent men, dragging their names through the dirt, forcing them to fall to their addiction demons, bleeding them dry, casting them aside?

No. It cannot.

Lamar Odom has been struggling with his addiction for years. His father is a heroin addict. His mother died of cancer when he was 12, and he was raised by his grandmother in New York. He was 18 years old when he was first arrested, for soliciting prostitution after he was released from school to pursue his talent for basketball.

Khloe and Lamar on their wedding day.

He then entered the world of professional sportsmen, not an industry known for restraint. He had already been living in that world for 10 years when he met and married Khloe Kardashian, at a time when her reality show stardom was exploding.

Lamar and Khloe were married for six years. In Hollywood, that’s around 20, although they split after just over four. They famously married in 2009 after only knowing each other for four weeks, and spent the next few years trying to prove everyone wrong about their relationship. They made a reality show proclaming their love, they released a fragrance (unfortunately named Unbreakable), they were open about their fertility problems, their sex lives and pretty much everything that reality stars are expected to be open about.

Take a look through Khloe and Lamar’s love life. Post continues after gallery:

Khloe and Lamar