Vogue Williams has criticized Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis over his former relationship with Australian model Helena Vestergaard, who was 19 when the pair began dating.
Discussing large age gaps on her podcast, Williams argued that legality alone does not settle whether a relationship is appropriate. The 40-year-old presenter addressed Kiedis, now 63, during an episode of My Therapist Ghosted Me with comedian Joanne McNally.
Kiedis has more recently been publicly linked to 30-year-old writer and Going Mental podcast host Eileen Kelly, who wrote about dating a man more than twice her age in an April 2026 essay for Vogue without identifying him by name.
Williams and McNally also questioned whether people judge age-gap couples differently depending on gender and sexual orientation. Their conversation moved beyond Kiedis and Vestergaard into the power imbalances that can arise when partners are at sharply different stages of life.
Williams Said Legality Was Not Her Only Test
Williams’ bluntest objection centered on the ages at which Kiedis and Vestergaard became involved. Although a 19-year-old is legally an adult, Williams argued that being legally permitted to pursue a relationship does not automatically make doing so a good decision.
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” she said. McNally pushed the conversation toward a broader frustration with older male celebrities dating much younger women. “It’s not all men,” she said. “However, it seems to be a lot of them.”
Kiedis and Vestergaard were together from 2013 until 2015. Entertainment Weekly reported that the Australian model was 19 when the relationship began, while Kiedis was 50.
After considering a listener’s account of a relationship between two women with an age difference of more than 30 years, they recognized that they might react less harshly than they would to a similarly large gap between an older man and a younger woman.
Eileen Kelly Has Defended Her Current Age-Gap Relationship
Kiedis has been photographed with Kelly on multiple occasions since late 2025, and PEOPLE has identified him as the much older boyfriend discussed in her Vogue essay. Kelly herself did not name Kiedis in the piece.
In “My Boyfriend Is Double My Age,” Kelly wrote that she met her partner at a birthday party and initially assumed the connection would develop into a friendship. Kelly acknowledged that large age differences can create potentially dangerous power dynamics when one partner supplies the other’s financial or emotional stability.
She argued that her own circumstances are different because she has her own career, money and home and would not risk losing everything if the relationship ended. She also drew a clear distinction between being in an age-gap relationship at 30 and entering one as a much younger adult. “If I were 18, or even 21, the scales would be weighted far differently,” Kelly wrote.
