Former Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi found it “amusing” that fans believe she is dating All-Star winner Melissa King, she revealed on Thursday.
In an interview on New York Magazine and Vulture’s Good One podcast, Lakshmi insisted that the pair’s close friendship was only that.
She and King sparked romance rumors in October with an Instagram post showing the pair wearing matching Adams Family Halloween costumes. “I would die for her. I would kill for her. 🥀🖤 - Gomez Paddams,” King wrote in the caption to the post.
The online chatter “was largely positive and not out of the realm of possibilities, so I found it charming,” she explained, “This is a person I love anyway, you know, in one sense, maybe not in the sense that everyone else thinks, so what was I going to do? Be like, ‘No, that’s not true’? If I was leaning that way, that would be a great person.”
Public interest in her personal life used to have a greater effect, she admitted.
“For a long time, whether it was on social media or the internet or whatever, it did bother me because there was so much focus on my personal life rather than my professional life,” Lakshmi confessed.
Lakshmi was married to author Salman Rushdie from 2004 to 2007. She was in an on-again, off-again relationship with venture capitalist Adam Dell, with whom she shares 16-year-old daughter, Krishna, from 2009 to 2021. Lakshmi also dated IMG CEO Teddy Forstmann from 2009 until his death from brain cancer in 2011.
“I was frustrated about that, and it made people think that I didn’t have a professional life,” she continued. “My first cookbook came out in 1999. My first food show on the Food Network came out in 2000. I was a journalist! You know, I mean, I wasn’t hard-hitting, covering war, but I had a syndicated column in The New York Times. I was writing for Vogue. I was writing for Harper’s Bazaar, a style column there.”
She concluded, “People don’t… nobody reads bylines. Nobody cares. You know, it’s sort of like, they just want to see the picture.”
