Photo: Vince Flores/Startraks
It was a shocking headline that caused a national media frenzy. In 2014, news broke that Hank Baskett hadan affair with a transgender modelwhile his wifeKendra Wilkinsonwas eight months pregnant.
Now, one year later, the parents of Hank IV, 5, and Alijah, 13 months, are finally coming clean about what happened on that fateful day — and how they picked up the pieces.
“I messed up,” a teary-eyed Baskett tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I put myself in a bad situation. And everything through me brought pain upon this family.”
Last April, Baskett says he encountered a couple in a grocery store parking lot smoking marijuana. The former football player, 32, says he approached the couple to buy some pot; they gave him a phone number to call and, when he did, provide an address. Once he showed up at home, Baskett says he used the restroom, and when he emerged, “I saw something I thought I would never see in my life.”
Baskett says the person who answered the door, a transgender woman, was nude and making out with another transgender woman. “I froze,” says Baskett, visibly shaking as he recalls the memory. Then, the woman who answered the door approached Baskett and fondled him through his basketball shorts.
“I didn’t engage in anything,” he says. “It was like a bank robbery. You never know when you’ll freeze. I don’t know if it was a couple of seconds or 15 seconds, because all I was saying was get out, get out, get out.”
After the initial media onslaught, just five weeks after Alijah’s birth, a blindsided Wilkinson “went ballistic,” she says. TheKendra on Topstar, 30, kicked Baskett out, flushed her wedding rings down the toilet and threatened divorce. “I couldn’t control my emotions.”
But when Baskett finally worked up the courage, to be honest, Wilkinson was understanding, even sympathetic. “Hank was very naïve and gullible,” she says. “He thinks everybody is his friend. That led him to the hell that we’ve lived.”
Baskett vehemently denies the allegations that claim mutual masturbation took place and that Baskett sought out the woman specifically after he found photos of her online. “It’s hard to defend yourself when people are making up lies,” he explains his decision to stay quiet initially. “You never know what someone will make up [next].”
Now, after months of therapy, including a stint on WE tv’sMarriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars, the couple — married since 2009 — are focused on moving on. “I’m finding the trust again,” says Wilkinson. “And I’m very happy Hank went through this now because he’s able to teach his son and his daughter what it’s like to make a mistake and what you do after making a mistake.”
And with the secret finally out, “I have a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” says Baskett. “I feel extremely free.”
For more from Kendra and Hank, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
source: people.com
