Padma Lakshmi Recalls ‘Slut Shaming’ While Her Daughter’s Paternity Was Being Questioned in 2010

In a past interview with PEOPLE, Lakshmi said she was "between relationships" at the time

Padma Lakshmi is opening up about a difficult time in her life. In an interview with the New Yorker, the former Top Chef host reflected on when her daughter’s paternity was questioned.

Lakshmi welcomed Krishna, 14, with Adam Dell in 2010 and did not share Dell's identity at the time. During an interview on PEOPLE's previous podcast Me Becoming Mom, she explained that she was “between relationships” at the time.

In her 2016 memoir, Love, Loss and What We Ate, she shared more details about how she navigated the situation with Dell and the other man she was dating at the time, Teddy Forstmann, with a paternity test. (Forstmann was the CEO of IMG and helped raise Krishna before his death in 2011.)

The deeply personal moment became highly public for Lakshmi.

Related: Padma Lakshmi on the Media Attention Surrounding the Identity of Her Baby's Father: 'Mortifying'

“It was just about as horrible as is possible to be,” Lakshmi told the New Yorker for their digital Food issue. “I mean, talk about slut shaming.”

Lakshmi began dating Dell in 2009, two years after she divorced novelist Salman Rushdie. She met the writer in 1999 when he was 51 and she was 28. While many focused on their age difference and different career paths, Lakshmi told the New Yorker that their romance was very real.

“What the tabloids never said was the truth: We really loved each other,” she said of Rushdie.

They married in 2004 and divorced in 2007. Lakshmi was very candid about it all in her memoir.

Related: Padma Lakshmi Went by a Less ‘Exotic’ Name in High School, Says It ‘Must Have Broken’ Her Mom’s Heart

“I think I’m now at peace with it. I wasn’t at peace with it for a long time—I felt that the narrative of my life had been stolen from me, because of who I was standing next to,” she told the New Yorker. “I needed to give up even more of my privacy with the memoir in order to take my narrative back."

These days, the cookbook author weaves her own narrative in more ways than one — be it through her show Taste the Nation or her more casual social media videos with her daughter.

Lakshmi was linked to poet Terrance Hayes in 2021 but told the magazine that ended due to the demands of her job and motherhood. In November 2023, PEOPLE confirmed that Lakshmi and black-ish creator Kenya Barris were in the early stages of dating.

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Read the original article on People.