Gayle King’s Ex-Husband, William Bumpus, Had Some Nerve

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Gayle King’s Ex-Husband, William Bumpus, Had Some Nerve

Photo: Marc Piasecki/WireImage

I will be thinking about Gayle King catching her (now) ex-husband, William Bumpus, “boinking around” with her (now) ex-friend for the rest of my life. King appeared on Call Her Daddy on Wednesday and spent a sizable chunk of the interview talking about this incident in visceral detail. Though she has mentioned it before — in a 2016 Vanity Fair interview she quipped, “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.” — she has never painted quite as clear a picture as she did on CHD. We thank her for her service.

The way King described it to Alex Cooper, the circumstances in which she caught her husband cheating could have been written by Nora Ephron. King apparently came home from the airport unexpectedly early, with her two toddler sons in tow, and found that the house alarm was on, a detail she found odd. Then Bumpus came “flying out of the room” wearing nothing but a towel. “He goes, ‘You can’t come in,’” King said. Bumpus apparently told her that “someone” was in the house, so King started searching and eventually found her friend “cowering behind the door” wearing King’s nice bath sheet. This lady — who King described as a close friend — apparently had the gall to tell King that Bumpus was only with her for the kids and because King could pay his Yale Law School tuition.

The layers of disrespect in this story continue to pile up. At this point, King had left the kids with the nanny, but because no one has disabled the house alarm, the police showed up. Knowing nothing about the bath sheets or the betrayals, the cops’ first reaction was to ask King, then a local news anchor, for her autograph. Then Bumpus decided to take the girlfriend home so they could still hide the affair from her husband, because he felt they had a “good marriage.” Sure.

King told Cooper that she wasn’t planning to tell the other husband about the affair until she talked to Oprah Winfrey, the true hero of this tale. “[Winfrey] said, ‘Well, fuck him. Call her husband,’” King said. But when she did, she found that the girlfriend had beaten her to the punch. The husband apparently told King his wife already said “that you came home early unexpectedly and you drew the wrong conclusion.” He then told her she was delusional (again, all according to King), even after she mentioned the girlfriend’s pink silk pajama top and mint-green panties in her bed. I know.

Unfortunately, King did get back together with Bumpus for a while before divorcing him for good, which was incredibly frustrating for Winfrey. The good news is that King saw Bumpus at their grandchild’s christening just a day before filming this very CHD episode and, according to her, “He ain’t looking so good.” And scene.

So how does Bumpus feel about King’s side of events? Well, he is sort of sorry. In 2016, after King shared that tidbit with Vanity Fair, Bumpus publicly apologized “for the major transgression that dramatically changed all of our lives.” As a member of the public, I don’t know if I can forgive him at this point. Mint-green panties? Come on.