Gayle King Recalls Finding Her Husband Cheating on Her In Their Marital Home

CBS Mornings host Gayle King has opened up about the incredibly painful moment she found her ex-husband cheating on her with her best friend in the Connecticut home that they shared with their young children.

King, 71, spoke out about the confrontation during an appearance on Alex Cooper‘s “Call Her Daddy” podcast, recalling how she returned home unannounced from a trip to Washington, DC, to find her former spouse, William Bumpus, and the unnamed woman wearing nothing but towels.

She explained that she had been in DC when her flight back home was canceled—leaving her scrambling to try and get home with her children, Kirby and William Jr., who were “2 and 3 at the time,”

“I didn’t even have time to call and say, ‘I’m coming home,'” she recalled. “We got to the airport, got in the car, came home, and the alarm was set, which I thought, ‘That’s strange because you’re here by yourself. You’re a big ass grown 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. And he goes, ‘You can’t come in.’ What do you mean I can’t? I can’t come in? What are you talking about?”

At this point, Bumpus told King that there was “someone” in their room, however she admits that she was initially “oblivious” about what he was trying to tell her.

“I go, ‘Someone like who?'” she said. “I mean, I was so oblivious.”

Convinced he was playing some kind of prank on her, King initially told her husband to move aside and let her get into the room, before she began searching the house in order to find the mysterious person he was referring to.

“I start searching the house because I didn’t believe him. I get down and there they are. Or, there she is, cowering behind the door in my towel. It was a nice bath sheet!” she went on.

When asked by Cooper how she responded to finding her friend there in her towel, King said her first reaction was one of total disbelief, recalling: “I said, ‘I can’t believe that you are here and that you are doing this. I can’t believe you are doing this.’

“I even said, ‘I thought we were friends!’ I sounded so pitiful.”

Meanwhile the former couple’s children were outside with her nanny, Verge, where King said she had left them because her husband had been so insistent that she not enter the home.

“I did leave the kids outside because he was so adamant and, you know, they’re little toddlers,” she said. “So Verge is with the kids and I said, ‘Verge, take the children and go to the back room. Go to the back room and shut the door.'”

When Verge began asking what was going on, King told her briefly that she had found the woman—whom she refers to only by the pseudonym Casey—naked inside her home, a revelation that left her nanny devastated.

However, the saga did not end there; King, having ushered her kids and their nanny into a back room of the house, proceeded to open the main door to the property when the alarm went off, triggering an immediate call to the police, who then turned up at her home.

“The police came and they said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Gail King,'” she joked. “I was a local news anchor, so I was well known in the community. [They said], ‘Hey, it’s Gail King! Are you OK?’ I go, ‘Yeah, you know, as I was coming in, I didn’t set off the alarm in time, I’m so sorry.’

“And they said, ‘Could I get your autograph?’ And I’m just thinking, ‘Yeah sure, sure.’ I wanted to say, ‘Could you take out the trash?’ But I didn’t, I didn’t.”