For decades, America’s most famous BFF duo has fueled nonstop gossip — and now Gayle King is finally pulling back the curtain on the rumor mill that followed her and Oprah Winfrey for years.
The longtime TV personality sat down on the wildly popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast and admitted the endless speculation about her relationship with Oprah once got under her skin in a big way.
“It used to really bother me,” King confessed while discussing the decades-old whispers that she and Winfrey were secretly romantically involved.
And according to King, the rumors didn’t just stay in supermarket tabloids — they spilled into her personal life, too.
“I was recently divorced and the National Enquirer did a story about ‘that’s the reason for the divorce because they’re secretly gay,’” she said.
King didn’t dance around the issue. “Number one, if we were gay, we would tell you because believe me, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just I prefer a man. I prefer a man.”
That blunt response didn’t stop the gossip machine from churning. In fact, King said she begged Oprah to publicly shut it down years ago because the chatter was making her dating life miserable.
“You’ve got to say something on your show because it’s hard enough for me to get a date on a Saturday night and now people think I’m a lesbian. You’ve got to say something,” King recalled telling the billionaire media mogul.
But Oprah, apparently taking the old-school celebrity approach, wanted no part of a public back-and-forth. “No, we should just leave it be,” Winfrey told her, according to King.
The two reportedly argued over it repeatedly, with Oprah insisting: “Leave it alone.”
Easy for Oprah to say, King joked. “‘Well, that’s fine for you to say. You have somebody. I don’t,’” King said she fired back at her famous friend.
The pair’s friendship has been under a microscope for decades, largely because of their unusually tight bond in an entertainment industry where lifelong loyalty is about as rare as a sober Hollywood awards show. The two met in Baltimore in the 1970s while working at a local television station and have remained inseparable ever since.
King was previously married to attorney William Bumpus before their marriage imploded following his admitted affair. Oprah, meanwhile, has famously remained with longtime partner Stedman Graham since the 1980s without ever marrying him — a setup that has fueled endless public fascination for years.
These days, though, King says social media outrage culture has hardened her to the noise. “So, it used to really bother me and now even today there’s still people that say, ‘Well, you know, the truth is…’ I don’t care,” she explained. “I’ve now gotten to the point in my life that very few things get to me because, you know, when you go on social media, it is an accelerator on hate.”
That may be the truest thing any celebrity has said all year.
King added that while she occasionally feels tempted to “say my peace” when the online noise gets too loud, she’s mostly done trying to convince strangers on the internet of anything. She also made clear she refuses to slink around paparazzi “like some criminal” whenever gossip starts swirling. “I don’t want to look like I’m running from something when I know I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said.
