Gayle King didn't need a private investigator—she got the smoking gun herself. The CBS anchor opened up on the Call Her Daddy podcast about the moment she caught her ex-husband William Bumpus in the act with their friend, a discovery that ended her marriage.
King was supposed to be away, but a cancelled flight sent her home unexpectedly. "The alarm was set," she recalled to host Alex Cooper on the May 27 episode. "Which I thought, 'That's strange because, you're in here by yourself. You're a big, grown-ass man.' He never sets the alarm."
When she tried to enter a bedroom, William came "flying out of the room" with a towel on, telling her she couldn't come inside. "What do you mean, 'Can't?'" King said. "I can't come in, what are you talking about?" He told her someone was there—a confession she didn't believe until she found the woman cowering behind the door in her towel.
"I said, 'I can't believe that you are here and that you are doing this. I even said—I sounded so pitiful—'I thought we were friends,'" King recalled, her voice breaking with the weight of betrayal.
King had noticed something months earlier. "I always say if I was writing a book, the first line in my book would be, 'Whack,' the sound of a tennis ball," she explained. The woman had said something innocent about a tennis shot, but the intimacy in her voice had struck King as off.
The discovery happened in 1990. The couple, who share two children, Kirby and William, divorced in 1993 after 11 years of marriage. King's first call was to Oprah Winfrey.
In 2016, William publicly apologized for what he called "this life altering choice," telling Page Six he had "been haunted" by his actions. He praised Gayle as "a great wife, an excellent mother and a fantastic co-parent." Some betrayals, though, outrun apologies.
