William Bumpus: Gayle King’s Ex-Husband and His Career 

For most of his adult life, William G. Bumpus built a quiet, accomplished career as an attorney, educator, and family law specialist in Connecticut. But in the world of celebrity news, he is best known by a different label: the ex-husband of legendary broadcaster Gayle King. Their marriage, their two children, and the painful circumstances of their divorce have periodically resurfaced in the public eye, most recently in the spring of 2026, when King discussed the end of their marriage in vivid detail on a wildly popular podcast. This post takes a closer look at who William Bumpus actually is: his education and career, his marriage to Gayle King, the scandal that ended it, and where he stands today.

Who Is William Bumpus?

William Bumpus is an American attorney with more than three decades of experience in family law, criminal prosecution, and higher education administration. He currently serves as a partner with The Wolf and Shore Law Group, where he focuses on family law and works as a guardian ad litem and attorney for minors in child protection and family law cases. While his legal career has been substantial in its own right, Bumpus is far more widely recognized as the first husband of Gayle King, the Emmy-winning co-host of CBS Mornings and one of the most prominent journalists in American television.

Bumpus and King were married for roughly a decade, and together they raised two children who have themselves become recognizable names in media and entertainment circles. Decades after their divorce, the couple’s history made headlines again when King opened up publicly about the affair that ultimately ended their marriage.

William Bumpus’s Education and Early Career

William Bumpus’s educational path began with a Bachelor of Science in Marketing, which he earned magna cum laude from Central Connecticut State University in 1984, before going on to earn his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1988. That combination, an undergraduate business degree paired with an Ivy League law degree, set him up for a career that would blend legal practice with academic work.

Interestingly, Bumpus has credited his former wife with playing a direct role in that achievement. In his public statement following the 2026 podcast revelations, he acknowledged that Gayle King had encouraged and supported him while he pursued his law degree at Yale, a detail that speaks to how intertwined their personal and professional lives were during their marriage.

Early in his legal career, Bumpus worked as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Hartford, where he prosecuted criminal violations, before later serving as an Assistant Attorney General in the Child Protection Unit for the State of Connecticut. This early prosecutorial and child-welfare work would shape the trajectory of much of his later career, which has remained heavily focused on family law and the protection of children within the legal system.

William Bumpus’s Career Split Between Law and Academia

What sets Bumpus apart from many attorneys is the degree to which he has split his professional life between courtroom work and the classroom. He has served as an Adjunct Professor and Associate Dean at Central Connecticut State University, where he built advising programs and coordinated student orientation efforts, and he also worked as an Associate Professor teaching courses in management, ethics, and business law.

Beyond his university roles, Bumpus has also worked as a Faculty Consultant at Charter Oak State College and served as Of Counsel at the law firm of Lyle, Hume & Ngobeni, providing legal representation and litigation support. This blend of teaching and practicing law over a 35-plus-year career suggests someone who has consistently gravitated toward mentorship and institutional involvement, not just private practice.

His current focus, as a partner at The Wolf and Shore Law Group, centers on family law, including collaborative divorce work, which is designed to help couples separate in a more civil and structured way than traditional adversarial divorce proceedings. There’s a certain irony in the fact that a man whose own divorce became tabloid fodder has spent much of his later career helping other families navigate separation more peacefully.

William Bumpus’s Marriage to Gayle King

William Bumpus and Gayle King’s marriage began in 1982, when the two wed in what was, at the time, a relatively low-key union far from the spotlight. King was still years away from the national fame she would eventually achieve as a CBS News anchor and one of Oprah Winfrey’s closest friends. The couple went on to have two children together: a daughter, Kirby Bumpus, and a son, William Bumpus Jr.

Kirby Bumpus has since become known in her own right, working in media and brand partnerships, including a notable stint with Oprah Winfrey’s company. William Bumpus Jr. has largely kept a lower public profile but has appeared alongside his mother and sister at red-carpet events and award shows over the years, including high-profile gatherings like the Kennedy Center Honors and Variety’s Power of Women event.

For more than a decade, the Bumpus-King household operated like countless other young professional families: two working parents building careers while raising small children. That changed dramatically in 1990.

The Affair That Ended the Marriage of William Bumpus and Gayle King

In 1990, Gayle King discovered that her husband was having an affair, and the way she found out has become one of the more talked-about details of her personal history. According to King’s own recollection, she had been scheduled to take a business trip, but when her flight was canceled, she returned home earlier than expected.

King has described how she noticed the house alarm was activated despite Bumpus being home, and when she came inside, Bumpus came rushing out wearing only a towel and told her she couldn’t come in. King insisted on entering anyway, and what she found inside the house was a friend of hers, also wrapped in a towel, hiding from view. The woman in question was someone King considered a close friend at the time, which made the betrayal especially painful.

In a 2016 Vanity Fair interview using the magazine’s well-known Proust Questionnaire, King was even more direct about the moment, identifying the date and time of the discovery with striking precision, June 24, 1990, at 9:16 p.m., and noting she still held no warm feelings toward the other woman involved, even years later.

King and Bumpus divorced in 1993, after eleven years of marriage. Despite the painful end to their relationship, both parties have said over the years that they made a deliberate effort to co-parent their two children successfully, prioritizing stability for Kirby and William Jr. over lingering personal resentment.

The William Bumpus Story Resurfaces in 2026

For years, King had referenced the broad outlines of her divorce publicly, mentioning, for instance, in earlier interviews that she had been married to someone who cheated on her, and that she’d gone through counseling and ultimately found peace with the experience. But the story took on new life in May 2026, when King appeared on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, one of the most popular podcasts in the world, and recounted the 1990 incident in much greater detail than she had before.

The conversation reportedly touched on a range of topics from King’s career navigating sexism and racism in journalism to her decades-long friendship with Oprah Winfrey, but it was her candid retelling of catching Bumpus mid-affair that generated the most attention. The interview quickly circulated across entertainment and gossip outlets, reigniting public curiosity about who William Bumpus actually was and what had become of him in the decades since.

William Bumpus Responds Publicly

Rather than staying silent, Bumpus chose to address the renewed attention directly. The same day King’s podcast episode aired, he issued a public statement to multiple outlets, including TMZ and Page Six, apologizing for his actions decades earlier.

In his statement, Bumpus apologized not only to King but to their adult children and their respective spouses and grandchildren, acknowledging that the pain he caused had affected the entire extended family. He noted that he had already taken public ownership of his actions once before, in 2016, likely a reference to the period around King’s Vanity Fair interview, and said those earlier admissions still stood.

Bumpus also struck a notably gracious tone toward his ex-wife, stating that she had every right to share her own story and that he respected her decision to do so. He went further, describing himself as someone who remained genuinely admiring of King’s professional accomplishments and grateful for the life they built together, despite how the marriage ended. He specifically credited her with supporting him through law school and for the cooperative co-parenting relationship they maintained after the divorce.

This kind of public, on-the-record apology, issued decades after the events in question, in direct response to a former spouse’s renewed public account, is relatively unusual in celebrity culture, where exes more often stay silent or respond defensively. Bumpus’s response was widely characterized in coverage as measured and accountable rather than combative, which may explain why much of the resulting media coverage focused as much on his current career and apology as on the original scandal itself.

Where William Bumpus Stands Today?

More than three decades after his divorce from Gayle King, William Bumpus has built an independent professional identity centered on family law, education, and child advocacy, work that, notably, often involves helping other families navigate exactly the kind of painful separations he experienced firsthand. His current role at The Wolf and Shore Law Group continues to focus on collaborative divorce, family law disputes, and serving as an advocate for children caught in custody and protection proceedings.

He has also remained connected, at least publicly, to his children and grandchildren. His 2026 statement referenced his son William and daughter-in-law Elise, his daughter Kirby and her husband Virgil, and three grandchildren, suggesting an extended family that has continued to grow and stay connected in the years since the divorce.

For King’s part, she has spoken about the experience with a mix of candor and resolution, describing herself in past interviews as someone who went through counseling, worked through the pain, and ultimately arrived at a place of peace. The fact that both former spouses have, in their own ways, publicly acknowledged the difficulty of that chapter, while also emphasizing the successful co-parenting relationship that followed, paints a more nuanced picture than a typical tabloid scandal.

Conclusion

William Bumpus’s story is, in many ways, a reminder that public figures’ personal histories are rarely as simple as a single headline suggests. Yes, he is widely known as the man who cheated on Gayle King decades ago, a fact he has not shied away from and has publicly apologized for more than once. But he is also a Yale-trained attorney with a multidecade career spanning criminal prosecution, family law, and academia, someone who has spent much of his professional life working in the service of families and children navigating exactly the kind of difficult circumstances his own family once faced.

As Gayle King’s public profile has grown over the years, from local news anchor to one of the most trusted voices in American broadcast journalism, interest in her personal history, including her marriage to Bumpus, has understandably grown alongside it. What the renewed 2026 coverage ultimately revealed wasn’t a hidden scandal so much as a fuller, more human picture of two people who went through something painful together, raised two children successfully despite it, and, decades later, were each willing to speak about it with a measure of honesty and grace.

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