Gayle King reflected on the discovery that her ex-husband, William G. Bumpus, was having an affair with her close friend.
King, 71, recalled on the Wednesday, May 27, episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast that she unexpectedly returned home in June 1990 after a flight was canceled, but Bumpus told her she couldn’t come in the house.
“The alarm was set, which I thought, ‘That’s strange, because you’re in here by yourself,’” King said. “You’re a big ass, grown ass man. He never sets the alarm. And next thing I know, he comes flying out of the room and he’s got a towel on.”
Bumpus told her “there’s somebody in” the house. King said she was “so oblivious” to what was going on and started “searching the house” to understand what he was talking about.
“I didn’t believe him,” she admitted. “I get down and there they are — or there she is cowering behind the door in my towel. It was a nice bath sheet.”
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King laughed while remembering how she sounded “so pitiful” while confronting them.
“I said, ‘I can’t believe that you are here and that you are doing this,’” she recalled. (Bumpus publicly apologized for cheating in a 2016 statement to Entertainment Tonight.)
King and Bumpus’ kids were protected from the situation because they stayed outside with their nanny. This also helped the broadcaster stay composed.
“I was thinking, ‘The kids are here, I don’t want anybody to know,’” she added. “That was my main thought, ‘I don’t want anybody to know.’ That would not happen to me today.”
She added, “I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want it to be a scene,’ because they’re little, they know this person. My main thing was how do I — which is what I do about most things — how do I handle this situation in this moment.”
King even called her friend’s husband, who claimed that she “drew the wrong conclusion” about what happened.
“God, I haven’t told all these details,” King said, laughing. “This is not good.”
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There was also a moment between her friend, who remained unnamed, and Bumpus that took place before the affair was revealed. Looking back, King said that stands out in her mind as a red flag.
“I always say if I was writing a book, the first line in my book would be, ‘Whack,’ the sound of a tennis ball. She said, ‘Nice shot, Bill.’ The way she said it, there was such an intimacy in her voice,” King recalled. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I thought, ‘Why am I feeling that way?’ It was weird.”
King confronted Bumpus about it, but he allegedly tried to “gaslight” her, and she chalked it up to “overreacting” about the entire interaction.
King was married to Bumpus from 1982 to 1993. They share two kids: daughter Kirby, 40, and son William Jr., 39.
“I was happy,” King said of her marriage. “You know how they say the wife always knows? I swear to God I did not. I did not.”
She added, “It’s not like we hadn’t had arguments or anything, but I didn’t think that it was such disrepair that he was boinking around.”
