Jimmy Kimmel is being criticized by some fans after his wife, Molly McNearney, shared details about the beginning of their relationship.
The couple, who have been married since 2013, met when the talk show host hired her as a writer’s assistant on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2004, but it took him five years before he made a move.
Molly recalled how Jimmy invited her over to his house, seven months after ending his seven-year relationship with comedian Sarah Silverman, and had prepared her favorite foods.
She said that during a writers’ meeting, Jimmy’s cousin, Sal Iacono, had asked everyone: “If you can only have five foods the rest of your life, what are they?”
“I remember I said, ‘Pizza, crab claws, BLT, and chocolate chip cookies,'” Molly said on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast on Monday.
“And about six months later – talk about long play – six months later, I go to Jimmy’s house. He asks me to come over after work. I just got back from Africa, I think. And he was going to help me build a classroom over there.
“I went over to his house, and he opens up the door, and it smells delicious. And he’s like, ‘I’ve made some things.’ And it was pizza, crab claws, chocolate chip cookies, and BLT. He had remembered what my favorite foods were and he made them all!”
Jimmy’s thoughtful gesture was the moment Molly knew that he wanted to begin a romantic relationship, but she admitted she was hesitant to cross professional boundaries.
“Yes, yes! It made me very excited and very nervous!” she said after Dax asked if she “immediately registered that as, ‘He wants to [expletive].”
© Getty Images“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no. This is a bad idea.’ He was my boss,” she added, before Jimmy interrupted and said he “didn’t have that thought.”
“No, no, clearly,” Molly replied. “The person in power usually doesn’t. But I was very nervous about it. I thought it was a terrible idea and I was very skittish.
“I kept telling him, ‘I think this is a bad idea.’ And he kept saying, ‘It’s not a bad idea.'”
© Getty ImagesMolly and Jimmy had to do “a little bit of sneaking” to keep their romantic relationship “very, very quiet” for the first few months because she was “nervous” about it changing the mostly male work dynamic.
“I didn’t want it to change. And it did,” she continued. “I just kept thinking, statistically, this is not going to work out and [his] life isn’t going to change, but mine does. And that’s what freaked me out. Because I had worked really, really hard.”
Despite her hesitation, Molly and Jimmy eventually told their co-workers about their romance, and after three years of dating, Jimmy popped the question in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
© Getty ImagesThey married on July 13, 2013, in Ojai, California, and are now parents to two kids, daughter Jane, 11, and son Billy, nine.
Molly’s retelling of their “meet-cute” has divided opinions on social media, with some calling the story “absolutely gross,” and others comparing Jimmy to disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Reality TV star Spencer Pratt wrote on X: “Isn’t this what Harvey Weinstein did?” Another said: “Turns out he’s just another Harvey Weinstein.”
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