Eileen Kelly Addresses 33-Year Age Gap with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis in New Vogue Essay
“My own boyfriend is more than twice my age, which is either alarming or impressive, depending on who you ask. It’s my first time dating someone significantly older, and sometimes I joke with friends that I’ve been missing out my whole life.” — Eileen Kelly
Anthony Kiedis and Eileen Kelly were first publicly linked in November 2025, when tabloids photographed them holding hands in Los Angeles. They have been seen together several times since, including at the Grammys in February and at Madonna and Guy Oseary’s Oscars afterparty in March. Neither has commented publicly until now.
Kelly is 30. She founded the digital sex-education and relationships publication Killer and a Sweet Thang at 16, while she was still a Catholic-school student in Seattle being raised by her single dad. She has been a sex-positive voice in media since before she could legally drink. She also hosts the podcast Going Mental and has written for Vogue, SSENSE, and Coveteur. By 30 she has her own company, her own income, and her own home. That is the foundation her essay rests on.
Her Vogue piece, titled “My Boyfriend Is Double My Age,” ran on April 21. She never names Kiedis in it. They met at a mutual friend’s birthday party. They both have property in the same small Hawaiian beach town, which she has rented a cottage in for nearly a decade and he has owned a house in for over 20 years. They wondered if they had crossed paths at the beach or the local health-food store without knowing it.
Kelly writes that strangers ask her if Kiedis is her dad and tell him his daughter is beautiful. One close friend stopped speaking to her after she told her about the relationship. She writes that she has discussed her own past skepticism about big age gaps with Kiedis, who has been in several before her. She frames her position by emphasizing her own money, her own career, and her own home. “I love my boyfriend, but I’m not at risk of losing everything if we break up,” she writes. “It’s hard not to see that distance between needing and wanting as part of the balance that makes the relationship possible.” She closes with the line: “He is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard.”
Kiedis is 63. He has dated significantly younger women his whole career. He has called the pattern “his personal choice” in past interviews. Ione Skye in the late 1980s, when she was 16 and he was 24. Heather Christie, the mother of his now-18-year-old son Everly Bear, when she was much younger. Helena Vestergaard from 2013 to 2015, when she was 19 and he was 50. The pattern of girlfriends in their early 20s has continued into his 50s and 60s.
The 33-year gap puts them in a sizable celebrity cohort. Mick Jagger has been with Melanie Hamrick, 44 years his junior, since 2014. Cher has been with music executive Alexander Edwards, 39 years younger, since 2022. Richard Gere and Alejandra Silva are 33 years apart, married, and raising children in Spain. Patrick Stewart and Sunny Ozell are 38 years apart and married since 2013. Al Pacino and Noor Alfallah are 54 years apart and share a son. Dick Van Dyke and Arlene Silver are 46 years apart and just marked their 14th anniversary. Each of those couples generates its own version of the same argument.
His 2004 memoir Scar Tissue, co-written with Larry Sloman, is part of the public record those headlines draw on. He describes a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old fan when he was 23. He writes that he initially believed she was older, and that after learning her real age, they had sex at least one more time before he drove her home. The encounter inspired the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Catholic School Girls Rule.”
Separately, and documented in the same memoir, Kiedis was statutorily raped at 14 by his father’s girlfriend. He has spoken about it openly across his career.
Photograph by Backgrid of Anthony Kiedis and Eileen Kelly are seen attending night two of Paul McCartney’s farewell tour at The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles, California.
