Padma Lakshmi Calls Out 'Slut Shaming' Over Daughter's Paternity

Padma Lakshmi shares insight into her life during a difficult period. The Top Chef host opened up to the New Yorker about a time when her daughter's paternity was questioned. Krishna, 14, was born to Lakshmi and Adam Dell in 2010, but Dell's identity was withheld at the time. 

In her memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate, published in 2016, she discussed in more detail how she handled a paternity test with Dell and the other man she had been dating at the time, Teddy Forstmann. Forstmann, IMG's CEO, played a vital role in raising Krishna before his death in 2011. For Lakshmi, the incredibly personal experience became highly publicized. 

"It was just about as horrible as is possible to be," she admitted to the New Yorker in their digital food issue. "I mean, talk about slut shaming."  In 2009, two years after she divorced writer Salman Rushdie, Lakshmi began dating Dell. When Lakshmi met the novelist in 1999, he was 51 years old, and she was 28. Despite many people's focus on their difference in age and their differing career paths, Lakshmi said their relationship was genuine.

"What the tabloids never said was the truth: We really loved each other," she said of Rushdie. In her memoir, Lakshmi was very open and honest about the whole process, from getting married in 2004 to divorcing in 2007. 

"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."

In 2021, after a year-long relationship with Terrance Hayes, Lakshmi told the magazine she had ended the relationship due to her job and motherhood demands. People confirmed in November 2023 that Lakshmi was dating Black-ish creator Kenya Barris.