Gayle King is shedding new light on the moment she found her then-husband cheating on her with one of her close friends.
The “CBS Mornings” anchor opened up about overcoming an affair during a May 27 appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast. During the interview, she opened up about the end of her marriage to ex-husband William G. Bumpus, to whom she was married from 1982 to 1993.
The two share two children: daughter Kirby, 40, and son William Jr., 39. The kids, however, were just 2 and 3 at the time King discovered her husband’s cheating.
Gayle King Walked In on Her Husband Cheating
King said she had no idea her husband was being unfaithful, though, in retrospect, she admits there were some red flags.
“Hindsight is always 20/20. I always say, if I was writing a book, the first line in my book would be, ‘Whack,’ the sound of a tennis ball. And she said, ‘Nice shot, Bill,’” King told Cooper. “The way she said it, there was such an intimacy in her voice, that the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I thought, ‘Why am I feeling that way?’ It was weird.”
She said that when she asked Bumpus about the awkward interaction, he told her, “What are you talking about?” and “tried to gaslight me” into thinking she was just overreacting. King also said her friend was a married mother of two, and that the children and their spouses were friends.
As for how she “came home and caught him, unexpectedly,” King explained that she, the kids, and the nanny showed up at the house unannounced after a flight change. She thought something was off when she noticed the alarm was set, despite Bumpus being home.
“And next thing I know, he comes flying out of the room, and he’s got a towel on. And he goes, ‘You can’t come in.’ What do you mean I can’t come in?” she recalled thinking, before he told her, “someone’s here.”
“I start searching the house because I didn’t believe him. I get down, there she is, cowering behind the door, in my towel,” said King. “I said, ‘I can’t believe that you are here and you are doing this.’ I even said, ‘I thought we were friends!’ I sounded to pitiful.”
Per King, the unnamed woman told her, “He doesn’t even love you. He’s only with you for the children and the lifestyle.”
Turning to Oprah Winfrey for Help
Cooper was wondering how she handled everything in the moment, with the couple’s two young children also nearby. King explained she told the nanny to take the kids to the back of the house and shut the door.
Because the alarm went off when she opened the door, the police ended up responding to the scene as well, with King saying some of them were even asking for autographs as she was already a local news personality. “It was not a good night,” she shared.
When asked how she stayed so composed, King said she was only thinking about the children.
“I was thinking, ‘The kids are here. I don’t want anybody to know.’ That would not happen to me today. I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want it to be a scene because they’re little, they know this person,'” she continued. “My main thing was, how do I handle the situation in this moment? And she was married. I said, ‘I’m calling her husband.’ He said, ‘Don’t call, they have a good marriage.’ ‘Where does he think she is?’ ‘He thinks she’s away at a conference.'”
King said Bumpus even took the woman to the train station, where her husband would pick her up, none the wiser. Though her then-husband convinced her not to call the other woman’s husband, it was good friend Oprah Winfrey who convinced King to do just that.
“The only person I told was Oprah. She said, ‘Call her husband.’ So I call him, and you know what he said, he said, ‘She told me you would be calling. She said that you came home early, unexpected, and you drew the wrong conclusion. She told me you would call and you thought they were having an affair,'” shared King. “Masterful, isn’t it masterful?”
“They were both doctors, psychologists. He says to me, ‘You are delusional and out of touch with reality, and I suggest you get some help,'” she added. “I say, ‘You think I should get some help? Does your wife have a pink satin pajama top? Does she have some green mint panties that go with that? “By the way, there are semen stains in my bed.'”
“God, I haven’t told all these details. This is not good,” said King with a laugh.
Oprah tried to talk some sense into King, hoping to convince her to walk away. Winfrey even reacted to the woman saying Bumpus didn’t love her, with King saying Oprah told her, “the fact that she felt comfortable enough, in your house, buck naked, with your towel, that she could put you down in front of him and he didn’t defend you, imagine what he has told her about you.”
King, however, tried to make it work.
“If I hadn’t had children, it would have been game over,” she said. “But we went to counseling, tried to work it out. Got divorced and got back together. And then I realized he hadn’t really changed…He was cheating again.”
King said she never badmouthed her ex to their children, only letting them know what happened in the marriage after they became teenagers.
She believes that catching them in the act might have been just the thing she needed, telling Cooper, “The therapists say, it probably had to be that extreme for you to believe it.” She added, “Because if you had caught them and they weren’t buck naked in my friggin’ towel, he might have said, ‘She was just over here, we were working on something.'”
In the years since, the two divorced, and Bumpus has publicly apologized for cheating on King. The pair, she said, recently saw each other at their grandchild’s christening.
“I am at such a good place at the weddings, christenings, I’m like, ‘Can I get you anything?’ Him and the girlfriend, she seems very nice, lovely,” said King. “That only comes with time. The kids love their dad, the dad loves their kids, so you gotta figure out a way to navigate it.”
