Journalist, television personality and author Lisa Ling stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! Monday night, where she revealed she once dated music legend Prince.
Two decades ago, when Ling was a regular co-host on The View in her 20’s, Prince frequently watched the show and took a particular interest in Ling. Eventually, Prince had his people call her people.
“One day, our assistant gets a call from a man who says, ‘Yes, he would like to speak with Ms. Ling.’ And our assistant is, like, ‘Who is he? What are you talking about?’ And he kept going, ‘He would like to speak to her.’ Finally he said, ‘The artist formerly known as Prince would like to speak to Lisa.’ And so, knowing how much I loved Prince, she said. ‘Okay, well, here is her cell phone number.’ She wouldn’t ordinarily give it out. But she knew I loved Prince.” Ling went on to share what happened when Prince called her.
“He gets on the phone. I hear this voice, you know, this kind of soft voice, and it was him. I could tell clearly. He asked me if I wanted to go to the TLC concert with him. So I’m, like, ‘Yeah! Yes, I would love to.’ So he said, ‘I’m going to send a car to pick you up, come to my hotel, ask for Karl Marx, and they’ll let you come up to my room. He registered as Karl Marx.” Prince using German philosopher Karl Marx as his alias was interesting enough. However, Ling said it got even more interesting.
Ling shared, “I go up. He opens the door, and he is a pretty diminutive guy, and he looked at my shoes, and he said, ‘I really like your shoes.’ It felt like he wanted to try them on, but I thought that would be weird!”
Ling then recounted that the two of them went to the TLC show and, afterwards, went back to his hotel room, but was quick to point out that it wasn’t a #MeToo situation.
“I wasn’t really concerned that he was going to try anything, because it was when he was going through his Jehovah Witness stage. I felt pretty confident it’d be okay. So, we ended up talking until five in the morning about philosophy and having these very, very serious discussions. And that was it. I left Karl Marx’s room and went back, and he asked me to come over the next day again. And so, I went over there, and we talked until five o’clock in the morning. Had a great, incredibly stimulating discussion,” explained Ling, before she described the weird thing that happened next.
“The next day I went back and was doing my job at The View, and I was talking on-air about someone that I dated a long time ago. And I got a call at five o’clock the next morning, and it was Prince calling himself, the guy didn’t call, and he said, ‘Who were you talking about?’ And I said, ‘I was talking about someone in my past.'” Ling said Prince got very inquisitive, asking, “Why were you talking about him?”
“As though we were, like, we had a relationship or something,” Ling told Kimmel. “But I was talking about someone in my past. And that was it. He never called me. That was my relationship with Prince.”
“It was really strange. I mean, I still to this day think that he is the greatest artist who ever lived. But it was a little bit of a weird interaction that we had over the course of a couple days,” concluded Ling.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on ABC.
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