David Foster and Katharine McPhee have been married for five years now, and have a son, Rennie, who is three. David also has five adult daughters from previous marriages. David and Katharine have always been, how shall I say, a curious couple. They have a 34-year age difference, and he was a mentor to her when she was on American Idol as a 21-year-old newbie. Now a video has resurfaced that harkens back to those American Idol days. The happy couple are at some public function, and a photo of Katharine on Idol is projected on the back of the stage. Katharine refers to herself as “chubby.” Then David — the man who bemoaned being known for RHOBH instead of his Grammys — chimes in with, “Oh yeah, you were fat.” What. An. A**hole.
In the video, McPhee — who has struggled with bulimia — is speaking on stage while Foster sits at a piano.
The background screen shows a photo of McPhee when she was a contestant on American Idol. As the singer explains, “[People] may not know, we met 17, almost 18 years ago, when I was a little chubby, and cheerful, contestant on American Idol.”
Gesturing to the older photo of herself, McPhee, now 40, says, “Look at me smiling.”
“Oh yeah,” Foster, now 74, says. “You were fat.”
In the clip, McPhee’s hands drop to her sides and her shoulders slump while the audience laughs.
“I was a little chubby, okay?” she says.
“It’s true,” he replies.
“I was just young,” says McPhee, who was 21 when she was on American Idol.
The Masked Singer alum has told PEOPLE that at one point during her struggle with bulimia, she was forcing herself to vomit as many as seven times a day, which she likened to “putting a sledgehammer to your vocal cords.”
McPhee sought treatment at Los Angeles’s Eating Disorder Center of California, where she spent three months undergoing both group and individual therapy, six days a week.
It’s her experience with disordered eating that prompted her fans to sound off on the video, with one saying, “It’s very hard to watch.”
“It really just goes to show the way he views women,” said The Pop Apologists.
“If he can say that in front of a crowd, imagine the insensitive comments in private,” said another fan.
This isn’t the first time Foster’s remarks on McPhee’s body have come under fire. In 2021 the Smash alum defended him after he wrote “What baby!” on an Instagram photo she shared of herself in a bikini, following the birth of son Rennie, now 3.
“I lost this baby weight without dieting. Zero. Diets are the worst and I’ve had zero pressure from anyone. I’ve let my body do its thing and found a great workout. That’s it. And guess what? I’ll probably gain weight again at some point too. Who cares? BUT people freaking out about what my husband captioned seriously get a life,” McPhee wrote.
Even so, the singer has shared that relapsing is always a concern — especially after she became pregnant in 2020.
“I was suddenly so obsessed with food, starting from this first trimester, and I had such a distortion of the way that I looked,” she said on the podcast Dr. Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy Podcast, where she added that she gained about 40 lbs. during her pregnancy.
She said she sought treatment from a psychiatrist and learned “that it’s really common for women who have struggled with eating disorders in the past to have almost a relapse, in some sense, when they enter pregnancy.”
Since then, she’s said, “What I didn’t expect was to have the baby and then be so at peace with my body.”
McPhee continued: “I had this, wow, like this huge appreciation of what my body had just done and given me that I wish that I’d given myself a little bit more of that grace through the pregnancy.”
First of all, I’m glad that pregnancy connected Katharine to a newfound love and appreciation of her body. That must be a very healing experience. As for her husband, here’s what I have to say: I don’t have any objections to age-gap relationships on principle. Each couple is different and brings a unique set of life circumstances to the table. Is it cringey in some cases? Absolutely. Was David’s argument a couple years ago that they’re “like Celine and René” more creepy than comforting? I think so. What leaps out to me is that David made that heinous comment of his beautiful, younger wife when he’s the father of five daughters. A man who thinks it’s ok to say to any woman, let alone his wife, “you were fat,” is not a man I want to know.
Photos credit: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon, Xavier Collin / Image Press Agency / Avalon, Getty and via Instagram