Vogue sex and dating columnist Eileen Kelly, who is dating Anthony Kiedis, has penned a new article about the benefits of being with a “much older man.”
In the column, while not naming Kiedis, Kelly, 30, downplayed the 33-year age gap between her and the singer for Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is 63. She stayed away from almost any details about her unidentified boyfriend in the column except to note he’s in his 60s and has a house in Hawaii.
“It’s my first time dating someone significantly older, and sometimes I joke with friends that I’ve been missing out my whole life,” Kelly said.
Kelly and Kiedis started dating this year, according to reports, and have been seen together at parties and around L.A.
“There is something to be said for a man who’s simply had more time to get his shit together, and my much older boyfriend seems genuinely excited to be with me — not like he’s biding his time before he can swipe for someone better,” she wrote. “He is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard.”
It was at a birthday party where they met, Kelly recalled. They struck up a conversation about a mutual connection to Hawaii and planned to go on a coffee date. They’re age gap didn’t register at first, according to Kelly.
“As we kept talking, we quickly realized our lives had crossed in other ways too, an invisible string connecting us,” she said. “I had met someone interesting and magnetic; if anything, I assumed we’d just become friends.”
Kelly noted that she’s lost touch with one friend over the relationship. She also said that she sometimes gets mistaken for Kiedis’ daughter, which she describes as “awkward every time.”
She brushed off any concerns about relationship power dynamics, positing that she has her own money, career and home and is “not at risk of losing everything if we break up.”
“If I were 18, or even 21, the scales would be weighted far differently,” she wrote. “We’re mostly just two people doing the ongoing, unremarkable work of moving through life together.”
Kiedis has a past with women who are generations younger than him. In the early 2010s, he had a relationship with model Helena Vestergaard when he was in his early 50s and she was just barely out of her teen years and some reports suggesting she was 19 when the relationship started. Their breakup inspired many of Kiedis’ lyrics on Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2016 album The Getaway.
When he was in his 40s, Kiedis dated model Heather Christie while she was in her 20s. The couple had a son.
Kiedis admitted in his autobiography, Scar Tissue, that he had sex with a 14-year-old girl when he was 23, garnering him significant public scrutiny and rebukes but little in the way of career damage. Kiedis sang about the encounter in Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1985 song “Catholic School Girls Rule.”
