Gayle King’s ex has issued a lengthy apology after the TV anchor revealed details of his infidelity during their relationship.
The CBS anchor opened up about her marriage to attorney William Bumpus on an episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy. King and Bumpus were married from 1982 to 1993. Their marriage dissolved after King discovered Bumpus was having an extramarital affair with her friend.
On the podcast, King recounted catching her husband red-handed. The TV anchor returned to their Connecticut home unexpectedly when her flight was canceled, only to find Bumpus and her friend “buck naked” in her own bedroom.
In the wake of the explosive conversation, Bumpus has released a fresh apology to his ex-wife and their two children, daughter Kirby, now 40, and son Will, now 39.
“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. Those actions were mine. I have long owned them—including publicly in my own words in 2016, which still stand,” Bumpus said in a statement to Page Six and TMZ.
“Gayle has every right to share what was a painful chapter that changed the trajectory of our marriage and our family nearly forty years ago. I respect her right to tell her story, and that’s where I’ll leave it.”
“What I will say is this: I remain endlessly grateful to Gayle. She gave me two of the greatest gifts of my life—our daughter Kirby and our son William. It was Gayle who encouraged and supported me through getting my Yale Law degree,” he added. King told Cooper that she paid for Bumpus to obtain his law degree.
“And it was Gayle who chose, with me, to co-parent successfully from the very beginning—a testament to our shared commitment to our children above all else, and now our grandchildren. The love and camaraderie we forged in that work have carried us all these years.”
“I am proud to have had a front-row seat to Gayle’s remarkable success, and I remain a genuine admirer and fan,” he said.
Bumpus, who also has a 16-year-old daughter, Poet, said that Gayle “recently sent warm wishes” for her birthday, and said it meant “a great deal.”
King told Cooper that she had temporarily gotten back together with Bumpus after divorcing him. “Then I realized he hadn’t really changed, but I was turning into such a shrew,” she confessed. “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 want to live like this,’ only to find out he was cheating again.”
King’s best friend, Oprah Winfrey, was unimpressed throughout the ordeal. “I know she wanted to say, ‘Shut the f--- up.’ To her credit, she never did. If you ask her now, she goes, ‘I feel like I went through that f---ing divorce. It was exhausting,” laughed King.
King has previously alluded to the affair, once telling Vanity Fair in 2016, “I’m not a huge fan of the woman I caught naked with my now ex-husband on June 24, 1990, at 9:16 p.m.” But in her interview with Cooper, new details emerged. She said her husband didn’t let her come into their room, telling King, there was “someone” in the house. She then found her friend “cowering behind the door.”
In 2016, Bumpus responded to King’s quip in Vanity Fair, telling Page Six, saying he has been “haunted with this life altering choice.” He added that he was “eternally grateful for King,” saying, “Gayle was a great wife, an excellent mother and a fantastic co-parent.”
In his latest statement, Bumpus also said that he “did not fully appreciate Gayle’s public life” during their marriage, and that he wanted a more “private” life: “I wanted ours to be more private, and that was something I wrestled with, and no reflection on her true talent and abilities.”
King, now one of America’s best-known TV personalities, reflected on her rise to success and its impact on her marriage, telling Cooper that her ex-husband “resented” her.
“I was a local news anchor, but I was a big deal in my state, where you’re well-known. I watch you all the time. And he just, he just didn’t like it. Keep in mind, he’s a Yale-educated lawyer. He’s to this day one of the smartest people I know. I used to love talking to him cuz I love great conversation. Very, very smart. So the therapist said, ‘If you want to become a doormat and do everything that he wants you to do, then this marriage can last.’ It took me a while to understand that he really, really resented me. He really did.”
Ultimately, King said she left, “Well, because I didn’t like who I was. Who wants to live like that?”
The TV personality, who never remarried, said that she would “really like to meet somebody” over the next few years. “I do think life is better when shared,” she said. “I do.”
