Gayle King found her husband cheating with a friend, who was also married.
Halle Berry empathizes, having experienced her own public marital infidelity.
Sharing such painful experiences can be therapeutic for women facing betrayal.
Halle Berry recently sent sisterly love to Gayle King amid her shocking revelation about what led to her divorce.
Source: Arturo Holmes/WireImage
During a sit-down on the Call Her Daddy podcast, King spilled the deets on how she found out her husband was cheating on her with a friend.
“He comes flying out of the room. He’s got a towel on and he goes, ‘You can’t come in,’ ” King recalled, saying her reaction was, “What do you mean I can’t come in? What are you talking about?”
After realizing that he was likely serious about someone else being in the home, Gayle said she went searching and, eventually, found her friend “cowering being a door” wearing her towel.
“I said ‘I thought we were friends,’ sounding so pitiful,” she said. “And she was married and I said ‘I’m calling him’, her husband, and he [her ex] said ‘don’t call because they have a good marriage. He goes ‘I’m going to take her to the train station so her husband can pick her up so he won’t know’. So they left and went to the train station and I called Opran and she said ‘let me get this straight, he lef you there alone and went with her? Oh girl you don’t even know how bad this is’.”
The red-hot interview quickly made its rounds on the internet, eventually catching the eyes and ears of Oscar-winning Halle Berry. The iconic actress has been famously dragged into many debates around what really can keep a man from venturing outside of his marriage after she was infamously cheated on by her ex-husband, singer Eric Benet. Though Benet has done a friendly Unc rebrand on social media in recent years, many old enough to remember may recall that he claimed to have a “sex addiction” after repeated infidelity in his marriage to Berry.
“I’m proud of her for, you know, saying that and sharing this, that happened,” Berry said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today with Jenna & Sheinelle.” “Because it has happened to many of us. You remember every detail of the whole situation, and it stays with you forever. So when you can share it somehow, that’s therapeutic.”
She added that in her own case, opening up about it was “very, very, helpful.”
Many women are asked to quietly accept cheating and are deemed as bitter if they ever speak openly about their pain; however, seeing women like King and Berry push back on that is refreshing. After all, the shame of the betrayer should not be held by the betrayed.
Speaking of the betrayer, Gayle’s ex-husband, William Bumpus, caught wind of Gayle’s interview and offered her an apology for his actions.
“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 told TMZ. “Those actions were mine. I have long owned them — including publicly in my own words in 2016, which still stand.”
