Gayle King’s ex-husband is owning up to his past mistakes.
William Bumpus shared a lengthy statement to Page Six Wednesday in the wake of the “CBS Mornings” host’s “Call Her Daddy” episode, in which she detailed the moment she caught Bumpus cheating on her with a good friend during their marriage.
“My deepest apologies to Gayle, to our daughter Kirby and her husband, Virgil, to our son William and his wife, Elise, and to our three grandchildren, for the pain I caused decades ago,” he began. “Those actions were mine.”
Bumpus went on to say King “has every right to share what was a painful chapter that changed the trajectory of our marriage and our family nearly forty years ago.”
“I respect her right to tell her story, and that’s where I’ll leave it,” he added.
Despite his past actions, Bumpus said he “remain[s] endlessly grateful” to King for giving him “two of the greatest gifts of [his] life”: their children — daughter Kirby, now 40, and son Will, now 39.
He also credited King, to whom he was married from 1982 to 1993, for having “encouraged and supported” him throughout his studies at Yale Law.
“And it was Gayle who chose, with me, to co-parent successfully from the very beginning — a testament to our shared commitment to our children above all else, and now our grandchildren,” he said. “The love and camaraderie we forged in that work carried us all these years.”
Bumpus expressed his happiness that he and King “remain in a good place” all these years later and noted how the journalist recently “sent warm wishes” to his daughter Poet on her 16th birthday — an action he said “meant a great deal.”
The attorney said he “did not fully appreciate Gayle’s public life” during their marriage as he’s “a private person by nature,” adding that he wished for their life together to “be more private.” He said he “wrestled” with that, but that it was “no reflection on her true talent and abilities.”
In fact, he called himself “a genuine admirer and fan” who’s had a “front-row seat to Gayle’s remarkable success.”
“I continue to work at being the best version of myself, grounded by the friendship, encouragement, and support of Gayle over the years, by the love of our grown children and our grandchildren, and by the daily privilege of raising Poet as a single dad,” he concluded.
During the Wednesday episode of “Call Her Daddy,” King recalled the devastating moment she “came home and caught [Bumpus]” in the act of cheating on her to host Alex Cooper.
King remembered telling the towel-clad woman, “‘I can’t believe that you are here and that you are doing this. I can’t believe that you are doing this.’ And I even said, ‘I thought we were friends!’ It sounded so pitiful.”
To make matters worse, she had triggered the home alarm system during this chaotic moment and, when the police arrived and got her autograph after recognizing her, she got them to leave without them figuring out what had happened.
“I wanted to say, ‘Could you take out the trash?’ But I didn’t,” she recounted. “I just wanted to get them in and out as quickly as possible.”
King first spoke out about the incident in 2016, leading to Bumpus apologizing for his past actions.
.