Kimora Lee Simmons is finally speaking out and sharing her thoughts when it comes to the controversial relationship that one of her daughter’s got entangled in 2024. And what she has to say just might shock you.
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As we previously told you, in April 2024, Simmons’ daughter and budding model Aioki Lee made headlines after she was photographed out on the beach cozied up with 65-year-old, legendary restaurateur Vittorio Assaf. Lee was 21 at the time. While some were wishing the couple well, their 44-year age gap wasn’t sitting well with others.
Even though Assaf and Lee’s fling was extremely short-lived, it garnered enough backlash on social media from folks who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. One person who was noticeably silent through it all, though, was Lee’s mother.
Now, Simmons is breaking her silence and revealing that she found out what her daughter was doing with the rest of the world once the pictures went viral. Simmons also shared that she knew of Assaf when she was growing up herself and said that his “reputation preceded him.”
“But it went from 0 to 100 really quick, and I was like, ‘Aoki, I didn’t even know this was a thing.’ I found out when the world found out,” Simmons said during an interview with the “Not Skinny But Not Fat“ podcast. “So that was what was so shocking. And you can’t say as a mom, and I’ve learned all these crazy things. You can’t give the, ‘I told you so,’ right now. You can’t give the, ‘What the hell are you doing’ right now. You can’t give those things right now.”
Simmons then went on to relate her daughter’s experience to her own, noting that she experienced a similar “age gap” relationship with her ex-husband Russell Simmons (when the two first met, Kimora was 17 and Russell was 35). But ultimately, she viewed those kinds of relationships as “predatorial” and not OK.
“I feel like and having gone through not exactly the same but similar…that big age gap relationship, let’s just call it that. I do think it’s predatorial. We said all of that to get to what Kimora thinks about it. I think that’s predatorial and kinda crazy,” Simmons said.
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