Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images
You know that scene in Love Actually when Colin Firth discovers his wife with his brother? Sure it leads him to learn Portuguese and find love again, but in the moment it was pretty jarring. Gayle King lived it. The newswoman went on Call Her Daddy and shared the story of when she caught her husband sleeping with one of her best friends. Not her best best friend, mind you. Oprah would never.
King had been traveling, and when her flight was canceled she unexpectedly returned home. That was when she discovered that her now ex-husband, William Bumpus, had set the security alarm for the house. “You’re a big-ass, grown-ass man. He never sets the alarm,” King said. “And next thing I know, he comes flying out of the room and he’s got a towel on.” Bumpus tried to tell King she couldn’t enter her own home, but she wasn’t having it. She suspected he had a woman there. “I start searching the house because I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe him … I get down and there she is, cowering behind the door in my towel,” she said of the close friend her kids called Aunt. “Alex, It was a nice bath sheet.”
“I said, ‘I can’t believe that you are here and you are doing this,’” King told Cooper. “I even said, ‘I thought we were friends.’ I sounded so pitiful.” King eventually told her ex-friend’s husband about the affair (whom she names Richard for the sake of the story), but he was in deep denial. “He said to me, ‘You are delusional and out of touch with reality, and I suggest you get some help,’” she said. “I said, ‘Okay, you think I should get some help? Does your wife have a pink satin pajama top? Does she have some mint-green panties that go with that? And oh, by the way, Richard, there are semen stains in my bed. Go fuck yourself.’”
The final slight? If you don’t disarm a home-security alarm, the cops come. And the cops indeed came, recognizing King and asking for her autograph. “I wanted to say, ‘Could you take out the trash?’” King said, referring to Bumpus and the ex-friend, “but I didn’t.”
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