Khloe Kardashian Responds to Backlash Following Kim's 40th Birthday Trip

Khloé Kardashian is standing up for big sister Kim Kardashian after the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star whisked friends and family away to a private island for her 40th birthday. While the photos she shared from the luxurious vacation, which Kim said helped them feel "normal" amid the global pandemic, were lambasted as out of touch, Kardashian said during an appearance Thursday on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that the experience was "so special."

Bringing between 20 and 25 of their closest friends to a secret location, Kardashian said she didn't "really know the extent" of the criticism her family was getting for the trip. "But this year is a frustrating year. I get it," she explained. "I think there's so many frustrations going on for everybody. But also it's her 40th. This is something that she wanted to do for us. It was such a nice thing."

While many people expressed their concern for the people serving them during their trip, Kardashian said she got nothing but a grateful response. "Being there with all the precautions that we took and being there and how grateful everyone was for the tourism aspect of it," she said. "So many people said that we were their first party of guests that they've had in months and what it's done for them to be able to pay their bills or to be able to do stuff for their family, just hearing those messages when we were there, we felt really good and we felt so safe. We did it in the safest way I could imagine someone doing it."

Overall, Kardashian said she hoped Kim could "focus on just how beautiful it was and what she did for everybody" instead of letting the criticism "overshadow all the greatness."

During Thursday's interview, she also addressed the revelation on KUWTK that she had contracted COVID back in March. "It was so incredibly scary. It's still scary, but especially then when the whole world was shutting down and we didn't really have any information or the information we had just changed every single day," Kardashian said of testing positive. "It was just super, super scary."

The Good American founder added that she got "really, really sick" from the virus. "I felt really quickly on that I was getting sick with something and I just wore a mask. I remember wearing gloves," she recalled. "It was speculation all about COVID, but no one really knew. But we were all like, 'There's no way that I could have COVID.' So I was still just really diligent, wearing masks. We got tested, my whole family got tested, and they came back and my results were positive. We were really alarmed but everyone else tested negative, so thank goodness."