Kathie Lee Gifford Opens Up About 'Absolutely Devastating' Infidelity In Her Marriage
TV personality Kathie Lee Gifford is coming clean about the effects of infidelity on her marriage, saying that it had an "absolutely devastating" impact on her.
In her memoir, It’s Never Too Late: Make the Next Act of Your Life the Best Act of Your Life, the 67-year-old former television host spilled the details about husband Frank Gifford’s transgressions, which happened about 11 years into their nearly 30-year marriage — and right in the thick of her popularity on the show Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee.
"Nobody knows what I went through. You feel hopeless and you don't want to live anymore," she described the ordeal.
However, she decided to give him a second chance — despite having weathered a difficult first marriage — due to the fact that it seemed to be one-off behavior from what she describes as her "good, dear, gentle, generous" spouse, a former NFL great.
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"If this had been chronic behavior from Frank, I would have divorced him like that,” she said, noting that it was a personal decision and that her devout Christian faith actually did not instruct her in any way to stay with her straying husband.
"After what I'd been through with my first marriage, then to be with a chronically unfaithful husband, no," she asserted. "Nothing in the Bible says we have to stay with that."
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With counseling, the two were able to move past the transgression. “We were able to turn it around. It was the right thing for my life to forgive my husband. And then work at forgetting,” she explained.
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"The person you loved the most in your life is the person that can hurt you the most," she admitted, but noted that everything worked out for the best, especially given the fact that the two were able to continue parenting their children, son Cody, now 30, and daughter Cassidy, 27, as a unit.