On Wednesday, May 27, Gayle King, 71, recounted how she unexpectedly returned home in June 1990 to find her then-husband, William G. Bumpus, in a towel and a woman cowering behind a door — the moment she says revealed his affair with a close friend.
King told the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast that her flight had been canceled, and when she walked in the front door she found the alarm set. "The alarm was set, which I thought, ‘That’s strange, because you’re in here by yourself,’" she said. "You’re a big ass, grown ass 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." She said she did not believe Bumpus when he said there was somebody else in the house: "I didn’t believe him," she recalled, and then discovered "there she is cowering behind the door in my towel. It was a nice bath sheet." King said she confronted them and told them, "I said, ‘I can’t believe that you are here and that you are doing this,’" while keeping her two children outside with their nanny because "I was thinking, ‘The kids are here, I don’t want anybody to know,’" and "I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want it to be a scene,’ because they’re little, they know this person." Her daughter, Kirby, is 40 and her son, William Jr., is 39.
The weight of King’s account — and the detail that the children were shielded from the encounter — underscores why listeners paused on her recollection. She said she called the friend’s husband in the aftermath, who told her she had drawn the wrong conclusion, and that a small moment before the confrontation had already set off warning signs for her. "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 said, ‘Nice shot, Bill.’ The way she said it, there was such an intimacy in her voice," King said. "The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I thought, ‘Why am I feeling that way?’" She called the episode weird and added, "God, I haven’t told all these details," then, more plainly, "This is not good." The episode revived interest in the story of gayle king ex husband William G. Bumpus and the June 1990 confrontation.
Context matters: King and Bumpus were married from 1982 to 1993 and share two children, and she has described herself as happy in that marriage: "I was happy." Bumpus later publicly apologized for cheating in a 2016 statement to Entertainment Tonight. King’s retelling on the podcast is a recollection of events more than three decades old, offered now with specifics she said she had not previously shared.
Tension runs through King’s version. She said she confronted Bumpus about the off moment with the friend and that he tried to push back — a claim she framed as being gaslighted. The verified details she repeated — the set alarm, the towel, the woman cowering, the children kept out of the house — create a clear gap between Bumpus’s explanations at the time and King’s memory of what she found. "How do I handle this situation in this moment," she said she asked herself, and later: "That would not happen to me today."
King closed the episode by returning to two plain truths she says remain: that she was blindsided and that she protected her children from the scene. "You know how they say the wife always knows? I swear to God I did not. I did not," she said. The marriage ended in divorce in 1993, and Bumpus’s 2016 apology is the public recognition of the cheating King described; her account on May 27 makes clear she remembers both the shock of that June night and how she would handle such a betrayal now — differently and with no tolerance.
