Padma Lakshmi Opens Up About Daughter’s Father, Divorce From Salman Rushdie

Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi has revealed that there was a time when she didn’t know the identity of her daughter’s father. In an interview with the Today show, Lakshmi, 45, opened up about...
Padma Lakshmi Opens Up About Daughter’s Father, Divorce From Salman Rushdie
Written by Pam Wright
  • Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi has revealed that there was a time when she didn’t know the identity of her daughter’s father.

    In an interview with the Today show, Lakshmi, 45, opened up about her new memoir, Love, Loss and What We Ate, which details secrets about her 2007 divorce from Salman Rushdie and the paternity of her little girl, 6-year-old Krishna.

    Lakshmi spoke frankly with Lauer about her decision to date two guys after the end of her marriage to Rushdie.

    “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.”

    In her memoir, Lakshmi details late billionaire Teddy Forstmann’s reaction to discovering that he was not the father of little Krishna, who was instead fathered by Adam Dell, the brother of Dell Computer founder Michael Dell.

    People magazine reports that when Lakshmi told Forstmann the truth, his reaction was volatile.

    “I saw his face go white, then beet red,” she wrote in the memoir. “It was as if the room could not contain him, or as if his body could not contain his fury at the information he had just received.”

    Despite the shocking news, Forstmann decided to remain by Lakshmi’s side and even left part of his fortune in his will for baby Krishna when he passed away in November 2011.

    When she wrote the memoir, Lakshmi decided to dedicate it to Forstman.

    “He wasn’t going to leave my side,” Lakshmi writes in the memoir. “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.”

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