Time to talk. In a candid new interview with the Today show, Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi revealed that there was a time when she didn't know the identity of her daughter's father.
Lakshmi, 45, shared numerous secrets in her new memoir, Love, Loss and What We Ate, including details about her 2007 divorce from Salman Rushdie, her endometriosis battle and the paternity of her little girl, 6-year-old Krishna. The scribe was open about the contents of the book during her interview with Matt Lauer on Tuesday, March 8, and addressed her decision to date two guys after the demise of her marriage.
"It probably wasn't the best choice, but it was the choice that I made at the time," she told Lauer. "I didn't want to be in a serious relationship. I was still really hurting from my divorce. I probably shouldn't have been with anybody and just taken the time I needed for myself. But I was presented with two very different, very interesting men. Men do it all the time. I chose to do it, and I was open with the men involved. I'm going to own my history."
One of the men in question was late billionaire Teddy Forstmann. In her memoir, Lakshmi detailed Forstmann's reaction to discovering that he was not the father of little Krishna. (Venture capitalist Adam Dell is Krishna's biological dad.) Ultimately, Forstmann remained by Lakshmi's side and even left part of his fortune in his will for baby Krishna when he passed away in November 2011.
Five years later, Lakshmi dedicated her new memoir to the mogul. ("He wasn't going to leave my side," Lakshmi writes in the tome. "Maybe he didn't know if he could stay in a romantic relationship with me or not. I think neither of us knew what was going to happen, but he was resolute in making sure I wasn't alone. He held my hand and he held it very publicly.")
The television personality was also very open with the Today show about her lifelong struggle with endometriosis, which impacted her fertility.
"From the time I was 13 until the time I was diagnosed, I missed 25 percent of my life. So I'm sitting here and I've lost six years of my life to this illness," she shared on Tuesday. "It's very debilitating.… It starts in adolescence, when it's such a tender time to begin with, and no one wants to talk about it."
