CBS Anchor Gayle King Lays Bare the Moment She Caught Her Husband Having an Affair With Her Best Friend In Their Marital Home

CBS Mornings host Gayle King has opened up about the incredibly painful moment she found her ex-husband cheating on her with her best friend in the Connecticut home that they shared with their young children.

King, 71, spoke out about the confrontation during an appearance on Alex Cooper's "Call Her Daddy" podcast, recalling how she returned home unannounced from a trip to Washington, DC, to find her former spouse, William Bumpus, and the unnamed woman wearing nothing but towels.

She explained that she had been in DC when her flight back home was canceled—leaving her scrambling to try and get home with her children, Kirby and William Jr., who were "2 and 3 at the time."

"I didn't even have time to call and say, 'I'm coming home,'" she recalled. "We got to the airport, got in the car, came home, and the alarm was set, which I thought, 'That's strange because you're here by yourself. You're a big ass grown 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. And he goes, 'You can't come in.' What do you mean I can't? I can't come in? What are you talking about?"

At this point, Bumpus told King that there was "someone" in their room; however, she admits that she was initially "oblivious" about what he was trying to tell her.

"I go, 'Someone like who?'" she said. "I mean, I was so oblivious."

Convinced he was playing some kind of prank on her, King, who was married to Bumpus from 1982 until 1993, initially told her husband to move aside and let her get into the room, before she began searching the house in order to find the mysterious person he was referring to.

"I start searching the house because I didn't believe him. I get down and there they are. Or, there she is, cowering behind the door in my towel. It was a nice bath sheet!" she went on.

When asked by Cooper how she responded to finding her friend there in her towel, King said her first reaction was one of total disbelief, recalling: "I said, 'I can't believe that you are here and that you are doing this. I can't believe you are doing this.'

"I even said, 'I thought we were friends!' I sounded so pitiful."

Meanwhile the former couple's children were outside with her nanny, Verge, where King said she had left them because her husband had been so insistent that she not enter the home.

"I did leave the kids outside because he was so adamant and, you know, they're little toddlers," she said. "So Verge is with the kids and I said, 'Verge, take the children and go to the back room. Go to the back room and shut the door.'"

When Verge began asking what was going on, King told her briefly that she had found the woman—whom she refers to only by the pseudonym "Casey"—naked inside her home, a revelation that left her nanny devastated.

However, the saga did not end there; King, having ushered her kids and their nanny into a back room of the house, proceeded to open the main door to the property when the alarm went off, triggering an immediate call to the police, who then turned up at her home.

"The police came and they said, 'Oh my God, it's Gayle King,'" she joked. "I was a local news anchor, so I was well known in the community. [They said], 'Hey, it's Gayle King! Are you OK?' I go, 'Yeah, you know, as I was coming in, I didn't set off the alarm in time, I'm so sorry.'

"And they said, 'Could I get your autograph?' And I'm just thinking, 'Yeah sure, sure.' I wanted to say, 'Could you take out the trash?' But I didn't, I didn't."

King admitted that she was desperate to get the police away from her house because she couldn't bear the thought of anybody finding out about the affair out of fear of how it would impact her children, noting that they were "little" at the time and also "knew" the person their father had been cheating with.

However, in the wake of the discovery, she phoned her best friend, Oprah Winfrey, to reveal what had happened—admitting that the TV mogul convinced her to tell the woman's husband what had been going on.

As it turns out, "Casey" had already tried to get ahead of the story, telling her husband that King had simply drawn "the wrong conclusion" when she found the two of them in her home.

"I call him, and he said, 'She told me you would be calling. She said that you came home early unexpected, and you drew the wrong conclusion. And she told me you would call and say that you thought they were having an affair,'" King revealed, while branding her former friend's scheme "masterful."

The man allegedly went on to tell King she was "delusional" and needed to "get some help," before she detailed exactly what clothing items she had found in her home—from the pajamas that the woman had been wearing to the color of her underwear.

Earlier in the interview, King conceded that, in hindsight, there had been some red flags that might have hinted her husband was going behind her back, but said she would constantly be "gaslit" whenever she raised her suspicions.

She recalled one instance when she and Bumpus were playing tennis with the woman and her husband, admitting that she spotted signs that something was awry—including the "intimate" way "Casey" spoke to her spouse during the game.

"She said, 'Nice shot, Bill,' and the way she said it ... there was such an intimacy in her voice that the hair stood up on the back of my neck," she recalled. "And I thought, 'Why am I feeling that way?' It was weird, because she was married, too. We were both married, we both had two little kids. Our kids were friends, the spouses were friends.

"But there was something about the way she said, 'Nice shot, Bill," that then I looked and I thought, 'Did I see them looking at each other?' [But] when I asked him in the car, [he said] 'What are you talking about?' They try to gaslight you."

Despite a nagging feeling in her gut, King set her feelings aside—however, she said she always wondered why she had "such a visceral reaction" to their interaction. Looking back, she now knows that her instincts were exactly right.

"Oprah always says, you know, sometimes you get a whisper and then you ignore the whisper, then it becomes a little pebble and then you ignore the pebble, and the next thing you know it keeps growing, and then you have a full-blown catastrophe."

While King and Bumpus did not immediately divorce, instead seeking counseling to try and work through their relationship issues, they ended up separating fully in 1993—although they continued to co-parent their children, who still have a close relationship with their father.

King's career, meanwhile, went from strength to strength in the wake of her divorce, having been working as an anchor at WFSB in Hartford, CT, the TV host went on secure her own radio show on SiriusXM, before landing the anchor position at CBS in 2011.

Bumpus has largely remained out of the spotlight—however, he issued a rare statement about his affair in 2016 when he was approached by Page Six, telling the outlet: "I have been haunted with this life-altering choice. Though I have dealt with this privately … I publicly apologize for the major transgression that dramatically changed all of our lives."

As for King's living situation, she continues to maintain a home in Connecticut; however, her primary residence is a sprawling penthouse apartment located on Manhattan's Upper West Side.