*A decades-old betrayal is back in the spotlight after Gayle King decided the time had finally come to tell the full story.
William Bumpus, an attorney King was married to for 11 years, issued a public apology through TMZ after his ex-wife detailed his 1990 affair during a sit-down with Alex Cooper on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. King, 71, had kept the story largely private for more than three decades.
“My deepest apologies to Gayle, to our daughter Kirby and her husband, Virgil, to our son William and his wife, Elise, and to our three grandchildren, for the pain I caused decades ago,” Bumpus said. “Those actions were mine. I have long owned them.”
The CBS Mornings anchor described returning home unexpectedly to find a close friend inside their house wearing her bath towel, while their toddler-aged children were nearby with a nanny. King confronted the woman directly. “I can’t believe that you are here and that you are doing this. I can’t believe that you are doing this,” she recalled. “I thought we were friends! It sounded so pitiful.”
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Rather than calling family, King reached out to one person after Bumpus left to drive the woman away: Oprah Winfrey. “The only person I told was Oprah. The only person,” King said. Winfrey urged her to contact the other woman’s husband, who turned out to already have been coached by his wife to dismiss King’s account as a misunderstanding.
King responded with specifics. “Does your wife have a pink satin pajama top? Does she have some green mint panties that go with that? And, oh, by the way…there are semen stains in my bed,” she said before ending the call with “Go f— yourself.”
Despite multiple attempts at reconciliation, King eventually discovered Bumpus was cheating again. “I would be out in the garage feeling the hood of the car to see if it was warm. I was going through his phone, and I thought, ‘I don’t wanna live like this,'” she recalled.
Their divorce was finalized in 1993. They share daughter Kirby, now 40, son Will, now 39, and three grandchildren. Bumpus said the two are in a good place today.
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