Kimora Lee Simmons Didn’t Love Her Daughter’s Age-Gap Fling
Last year, Aoki Lee Simmons made lots of headlines for a very brief fling that she, a 21-year-old model, had with a 65-year-old restaurateur, Vittorio Assaf. Over the course of about a week, their relationship was reported in the tabloids, paparazzi photos of them kissing on the beach were published in “Page Six,” and then People reported that the couple had split. “Not only is it ‘over,’ it was never a thing,” a source told the tabloid at the time. If that sounds like a whirlwind to you, imagine being Simmons’s mother, Kimora Lee Simmons. The model and designer is now making it clear she wasn’t thrilled with Aoki’s short-lived relationship, which she described as predatorial.
In a preview clip of an episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast set to come out tomorrow, Kimora said that she lets her kids “make their own mistakes” and added that, for Aoki and Assaf, their whole relationship was just “a moment.” That doesn’t mean she has warm feelings toward Assaf, though.
“First of all, I know this guy,” Kimora said, referring to Assaf. “But I didn’t know this guy in that capacity — like, with my kid, or that you were even dating my kid. I know this guy growing up myself. He’s a restaurateur. I don’t know — I don’t want to get into trouble legally, but I think his reputation probably precedes him. Is that okay to say, legally?” (It’s unclear what exactly she means by his “reputation,” but Assaf did briefly date the 22-year-old model Nya Gatbel in 2022.)
Kimora said that while she was concerned about what Aoki was getting herself into, she didn’t have much of a chance to question it because it was over so quickly. “It blew up to be so much, so then you can’t be the mom that’s like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But that definitely was the thing,” Kimora said. “But it went from zero 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.”
Even though Kimora was seemingly blindsided by the whole affair, more than a year later she does have some opinions about it. Kimora, who was 23 when she married a then-41-year-old Russell Simmons, doesn’t endorse huge age gaps: “I feel like 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 … I think that’s predatorial and kinda crazy.” Sounds about right to me.
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