“I did inherit Jackie’s Cartier watch. I ended up selling at auction,” Carole Radziwill says, seated across from an interviewer in a podcast studio. “Because it was cursed.” The clip, posted by @financialteapodcast under the title “How Jackie O’s Cursed Cartier Watch Ended Up on Kim K,” splits the screen between Radziwill telling the story and the archival photos that back it up: Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Radziwill’s own wedding photo, and eventually Kim Kardashian.

The watch had been a gift to Jackie from Prince Stanislaw “Stas” Radziwill, Carole’s father-in-law, who was married to Jackie’s sister Lee. “There was something about that watch that linked all of us,” Radziwill says. “Jackie Kennedy in the ’60s, me in the ’90s, and then my best friend in the 2010s. And all three were widowed in their 30s.” Radziwill’s husband, Anthony Radziwill, died of cancer in 1999.

Her plan to break the curse, by her own account, came from an unlikely place. “I had this idea that—which I think I got from an Indiana Jones movie, like when you return something that’s cursed to its place of origin, that it breaks the curse,” she says. “So I decided to auction the watch at Christie’s, with the hope of Cartier bidding on it and buying it back.” Christie’s held the sale, part of its American Icons auction, on June 21, 2017. The winning bid, reported at the time to be Kim Kardashian, came in at $379,500, though Christie’s does not confirm buyer identities. “At the very last second of the auction, Kim Kardashian bought it,” Radziwill says. “And we had all these mutual friends, I just thought it’d boomerang back at me.”

The story’s last turn is the one that gets the biggest reaction from Radziwill’s interviewer. “She had heard rumblings of this curse,” Radziwill says of Kardashian, “and, so in fact, she did want to return it.” Roughly two years later, Radziwill says, a clip from Kardashian’s reality show surfaced showing her wearing or discussing the watch. “And I was like— mmm… It’s a fake watch,” Radziwill says, laughing.

Christie’s own lot notes on the sale corrected a detail that had circulated for years: the Cartier Tank was long assumed to be a gift from President John F. Kennedy, but auction house research traced it instead to Stas Radziwill, which is the version Carole Radziwill repeats in the clip. The watch itself is a simple 1963 Cartier Tank in steel and gold, the same understated rectangular case design the brand has sold largely unchanged since 1917, which is part of why a piece with this specific provenance commands a price so far above what an ordinary vintage Tank would bring at resale.

For anyone holding a family piece with a documented history to a notable original owner, that paperwork is the asset. Auction houses that specialize in jewelry and watches, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, generally ask for whatever provenance exists, letters, photographs, prior appraisals, before placing a lot, since a verified chain of ownership back to a known figure is frequently worth more than the object’s material value alone.

More from Vinyl and Velvet

• Former Calvin Klein Intern Says She Turned Down an $18,000 CNN Job for $25,000 in Fashion, Then Worked on the Same Tenth Floor as Carolyn Bessette
• Carolyn Bessette Fan Who Sold Calvin Klein Collection at 22 Says Showroom Staff Could Not Wear Nail Polish, Keep Red Roses on a Desk or Speak to Calvin First
• Former Calvin Klein Staffer Says Painters Covered Scuff Marks Every Day, Desks Held No Photos and Gift Flowers Had to Go Home by Night in the Late 90s Office