Kathie Lee Gifford is offering candid insight into the affair that rocked her marriage to late husband Frank Gifford.
The former Today host, 70, reflected on how she forgave Frank for his infidelity while speaking to Entertainment Tonight in an interview released on Wednesday, April 24. Before Frank’s death in 2015, he had a highly publicized affair with Suzen Johnson, a former flight attendant.
“I could have let the seed germinate, but I don’t want to be that person, that bitter, angry, unhappy, miserable human being ’cause you know what you end up doing? You end up making everybody around you every bit as miserable,” Kathie Lee told ET. “I have always felt from my earliest youth that I had the choice every day of my life to be a blessing or a burden and I want to be a blessing.”
Kathie Lee and Frank shared two children, Cassidy, 30, and Cody, 34, who also factored into her decision not to create a “toxic” environment of resentment in the house when they were young.
“It’s a cancer in your soul and I don’t want that,” she explained. “I don’t want it for me, I don’t want it for anyone I love. I want people to be blessed and we all make our choices.”
News broke in 1997 that Frank and Johnson engaged in an extramarital affair. In her 2020 book, It’s Never Too Late, Kathie Lee recalled the “revelatory moment” she had while seeking the help of a therapist to heal in the aftermath.
“He said words that are now emblazoned on my heart: ‘Kathie, if you can’t forgive your husband, forgive your children’s father,'” she wrote. “It took my eyes off of me and set them squarely on my children, who were still completely unaware of their father’s unfaithfulness. My children’s father was a wonderful, loving, gentle, compassionate, generous and sweet man. He was easy to forgive because I knew his heart.”
Looking back on her marriage to Frank, who was 84 when he died of natural causes, Kathie Lee told ET that she can live with her choices because she “truly experienced a deep and abiding forgiveness of that person.”
Following her 2019 exit from the Today show, Kathie Lee still has plenty to celebrate in both her personal and professional life. She’s a proud grandmother of three, and her new book, I Want to Matter: Your Life Is Too Short and Too Precious to Waste, hits shelves later this month.
While speaking exclusively to Us Weekly at the QVC Age of Possibility Summit in Las Vegas on Wednesday, which seeks to empower women over 50, Kathie Lee shared that she lives her life as “one possibility at one day at a time.”
“I was raised that way,” she explained. “My faith drives every choice I make in my life and it’s all about, ‘What does God have for me today and who does God have or me out there that I’m going to trade on the plan with the man who needs it.’”
