Khloe Kardashian had a perfect life on Instagram. At home, her partner was trying to kill her.

When Lamar Odom first laid eyes on Khloe Kardashian in a nightclub in 2009, he was instantly struck. He immediately approached her and introduced himself.

“She has the same eyes as my mother. So when I first met her I was kinda, like, put in a trance by that,” Lamar, 39, told US’s ABC News. “But I didn’t even really know who she was. I could give a hell about the Kardashians.”

He, however, didn’t quite make the same impression on the then 24-year-old.

“The first time I met Lamar, I wasn’t that down for him. It was typical – I was in a nightclub, he was a basketball player… I wasn’t down for that whole thing,” Khloe told iVillage in 2011.

But they spent the night talking and Khloe was soon won over by Lamar’s big heart. He made her laugh, all the time, and within a few days, the new couple were “literally inseparable”, Khloe’s sister Kim Kardashian told People at the time. They’d already started talking about marriage. They both knew this was it.

For a long time, the public’s knowledge of their relationship came only from reality TV and social media. But now, Lamar has written a book detailing the ‘demons’ he was fighting, and what life was really like behind closed doors.

As is now Kardashian lore, nearly a month after they first met, the then Los Angeles Lakers basketball player proposed to the reality TV star.

Nine days later on September 27, 2009, three million people tuned in from all over the world to watch the pair wed on Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

With the Karadashian name and brand rising, Khloe and Lamar quickly cemented themselves as one of Hollywood's most famous couples. Their marriage played out for our viewing pleasure in their own spin-off reality show Khloe & Lamar between 2011-2012. To the world, they were a loving couple, regaling us with giddily romantic moments on their reality show and declaring they would be together forever - no matter what.

But behind close doors, Khloe and Lamar's marriage was plagued by Lamar's now well-known drug addictions and constant infidelity - the true depths of which Khloe herself didn't even know the extent of at the time.

“Love is blind... Lamar was so great at making me feel like I was the only one and I’m this princess. I never speculated cheating… so I didn’t know about cheating,” Khloe told Howard Stern in 2016. “It is humiliating on any level, but I found out he was cheating on me the majority of our marriage, I just didn’t know.”

Khloe called Lamar "really crafty" in the same interview, a fact that Lamar himself agrees to, writing in his memoir Darkness to Light: "[I had] paranoia, anxiety, depression. I couldn't keep my dick in my pants or the coke out of my nose. Drug addicts are incredibly skilled at hiding their habit. I'd get defensive and Khloe would just drop it.”

It seems Khloe herself didn't speak to her own family much about her marital problems, at least not on camera. With swirling rumours throughout 2013 of Lamar's cheating and substance abuse - including a 72 hour period where he vanished in August - his problems, or the issues they cause in his marriage to Khloe, were never directly addressed on Keeping Up With the Kardashians - strange for a family that trades on personal scandals.

In an episode of KUWTK that aired in November 2013, just a month before Khloe filed for divorce from Lamar, Khloe skirted around the issue of Lamar's drug addiction.

“Lamar has been having a really tough time lately, and it’s not just black and white. There’s a lot of emotional issues,” Khloe said. “It’s really scary when nothing’s really working and then you know, if you give up, no one in his life would be able to help.”

And on social media, Khloe never deviated from the highly filtered version of her life. Scrolling through her feed during the Lamar years, her Instagram is full of what we all know too well of now - glamorous photos (selfies weren't quite that big yet) with her and her family and friends, endorsements for various products, and loving shout-outs to Lamar. The only indication of anything awry in her life were the cryptic inspirational quotes she still posts to this day that many interpreted as referencing her marriage problems with Lamar.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

My homie ????????❤

A post shared by Khloé (@khloekardashian) on May 2, 2013 at 4:40pm PDT

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Everybody deserves somebody who makes them look forward to tomorrow. These two definitely give me so much to look forward to ???? #Family

A post shared by Khloé (@khloekardashian) on Apr 2, 2013 at 10:50am PDT

 

View this post on Instagram

 

LoLo I love your Earth Mother God flow ???? @iamlaurenlondon

A post shared by Khloé (@khloekardashian) on Sep 10, 2013 at 12:13pm PDT

Although the public learnt the depths of Lamar's drug addiction in 2015 when he was found unconscious in a near-fatal overdose in a Las Vegas brothel, it's only now, with the release of Lamar's memoir and subsequent press tour, that we know the true extent of the hell that Lamar put Khloe through in their marriage - besides the constant cheating and drug abuse.

Once, in his "man cave" at home, high on ecstasy and coke, he thought there were people coming from him. Believing there were microphones in the wall, he grabbed his golf club and began swinging.

Worried, Khloe called one of his friends to come over and intervene.

When she knocked on the door after the friend had left, Lamar lunged at Khloe, grabbing her by the shoulders.

“What the f**k are you doing?" he screamed into her face. "You trying to embarrass me in front of my friends? I’ll f**king kill you! You don’t know what I’m capable of!”

Lamar said he later asked Khloe “to forgive me.”

“I was embarrassed and ashamed,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was a new low for our relationship and my life… the most regrettable moment in a series of regrettable moments.”

Khloe has so far not made a public response to Lamar's memoir - although she's posted some emotional quotes to her Instagram Stories lately about still loving people that she'd cross the stress to avoid - but during a radio interview on Wednesday, Lamar said Khloe texted him the day before regarding his story that she once "beat" a stripper after walking in on him having an orgy during their marriage in 2012.

"She good, she talked about one of the stories I told in the book," he said. "About her coming to the hotel and putting her hands on the girl. She said she didn't even think I remembered that story."

Khloe and Lamar finalised their divorce in 2016, after delaying it in 2015 as Khloe helped Lamar recover from his overdose, even though their relationship was over.