Gayle King says the rumor that she and Oprah Winfrey were secretly in a lesbian relationship still has a life of its own, and she finally talked about why it has lingered for decades. On a podcast released Tuesday, King said the speculation once bothered her so much that she pressed Winfrey to address it on air.
King said the story took hold after she was recently divorced, when the National Enquirer published a claim that the breakup happened because the two women were secretly gay. She said she told Winfrey, who has been one of her closest friends for years, that the rumor was making her life harder, even to the point of trying to get a date on a Saturday night.
“It used to really bother me,” King said, recalling how the gossip spread. She said her response to the rumor was simple: if she and Winfrey were gay, they would say so, because “there’s nothing wrong with it.” But she added, “I prefer a man. I prefer a man.”
The point of friction came when King asked Winfrey to say something publicly because people were starting to believe the rumor. “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 her. Winfrey would not budge. “No, we should just leave it be,” King said Winfrey replied, followed by, “Leave it alone.”
King said the two went back and forth over whether to address it, but Winfrey held her ground while King argued that silence only let the story breathe. That divide is what made the exchange notable: one woman wanted the rumor shut down, the other chose not to feed it, even as the speculation kept circulating online and, as King put it, still bothers people who insist there must be some truth to it.
King said the rumors no longer get under her skin the way they once did, and she described social media as “an accelerator on hate.” Still, she said the noise can build enough that she sometimes wants to speak up just so she can be on the record and say her piece. Whether Winfrey ever chooses to address the rumor herself remains unresolved, and for now King is the one putting the story back into public view.
