NEED TO KNOW
- Kimora Lee Simmons is opening up about how she really felt when her daughter Aoki Lee, then 21, dated then-65-year-old restaurateur Vittorio Assaf in 2024
- She tells host Amanda Hirsch on an upcoming episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast that she found it “predatorial” but wanted to let her daughter make her own mistakes
- Aoki and Assaf briefly spent time together in April 2024 before parting ways
Kimora Lee Simmons is sharing what she really thought about her daughter Aoki Lee dating a much older man back in April 2024.
In a clip from the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast shared exclusively with PEOPLE ahead of the Tuesday, Dec. 9 episode, the entrepreneur spoke with host Amanda Hirsch about how she felt watching her then-21-year-old model daughter date then-65-year-old restaurateur Vittorio Assaf after the two met in St. Barths.
“What was your reaction to that in real time?” Hirsch asks.
“I let my kids make their own mistakes, like I said. That’s the whole thing we were saying about living out your life in public, and I think that’s very, very, very tough,” begins Simmons. “I don’t even think that was a moment for them, though. Or I should say the opposite. I think it was just that — a moment. I don’t think it was anything else.”
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“I don’t even know…first of all, I know this guy. But I didn’t know this guy in that capacity like with my kid or that you were even dating my kid,” she continues. “I know this guy growing up myself. He’s a restauranteur. I don’t know, I don’t want to get into troubles legally but I think his reputation probably precedes him. Is that okay to say legally?”
Assaf is the founder of Serafina Restaurant Group, and the two met while vacationing in St. Barths, a favorite Simmons family travel destination.
“Were you like, ‘What the helly are you doing to Aoki,’ or no?” asks Hirsch,
“I was, but I didn’t say it in that way because it was this fast,” Simmons says, snapping her fingers. “And it blew up to be so much, so then you can’t be the mom that’s like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But that definitely was the thing.”
“But it went from 0 to 100 really quick, and I was like, ‘Aoki, I didn’t even know this was a thing.’ I found out when the world found out,” admits the mom of five. “So that was what was so shocking. And you can’t say as a mom, and I’ve learned all these crazy things. You can’t give the, ‘I told you so,’ right now. You can’t give the, ‘What the hell are you doing’ right now. You can’t give those things right now.”
“She was going through it,” says Hirsch.
MICHAEL TRAN/AFP via Getty
“Yeah, it was a lot,” responds Simmons. “It was a lot. But I do think in general, of those kinds of things, I feel like and having gone through not exactly the same but similar…that big age gap relationship, let’s just call it that. I do think it’s predatorial. We said all of that to get to what Kimora thinks about it. I think that’s predatorial and kinda crazy.”
Four days after PEOPLE confirmed Simmons’ daughter and Assaf were spending time together, a source close to the Simmons family told PEOPLE that they parted ways.
“Not only is it ‘over’, it was never a thing,” the insider told PEOPLE. “Aoki is learning to navigate her private life in a public sphere. And that can be difficult. However, Kimora was concerned to see her daughter in that kind of relationship due to what she herself went through.”