Gayle King Recounts William Bumpus Affair Discovery in June 1990
Gayle King said she caught william bumpus in June 1990 after a canceled flight sent her home early and into a scene she did not expect. On the Wednesday, May 27 episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, she described finding another woman in the house and said her two children stayed outside with their nanny.
June 1990 at the House
King said the alarm was set when she got back, even though she thought that was strange because Bumpus was alone in the house. “The alarm was set, which I thought, ‘That’s strange, because you’re in here by yourself,’” she said, before adding, “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 he told her there was somebody in the house. “I didn’t believe him,” King said, and when she searched, she found the woman “cowering behind the door in my towel. It was a nice bath sheet.”
Kirby and William Jr.
King said the part she kept focusing on was keeping the moment from becoming a scene in front of Kirby and William Jr. “I was thinking, ‘The kids are here, I don’t want anybody to know,’” she said. “I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want it to be a scene,’ because they’re little, they know this person.”
She married Bumpus in 1982 and divorced him in 1993. The affair was already addressed publicly when Bumpus apologized in a 2016 statement, but King’s podcast account adds the detail that she learned about it by walking into the house after a flight cancellation, not through rumor or a later confrontation.
2016 and the apology
The story lands because King did not describe suspicion first; she said, “You know how they say the wife always knows? I swear to God I did not. I did not.” That makes the June 1990 account feel less like a rerun and more like a firsthand record of how fast a private break can become a family problem when two kids are already in the picture. For listeners, the takeaway is simple: the incident was handled in the moment, the children were kept outside, and King is still choosing to tell the story on her own terms.
