Anthony Kiedis' Girlfriend Pens Column Defending + Explaining Their 'Significant Age-Gap' Relationship

Over the years, 63-year-old Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis has drawn criticism for dating significantly younger women. His latest relationship (with 30-year-old writer/podcaster/social media personality Eileen Kelly) is no exception, yet in her newest column for Vogue, Kelly defended and explained her relationship with Kiedis as being more beneficial and acceptable than people may think.

What Kelly Said About Her Relationship With Kiedis

The column was published online last Tuesday (April 21), and Kelly started by recounting why she once told a friend with an unsatisfying history of dating people her own age to finally “try dating someone older.”

Afterward, Kelly said that her relationship with Kiedis is “either alarming or impressive, depending on who you ask” because he’s “twice [her] age.” She also remarked: “It’s my first time dating someone significantly older, and sometimes I joke with friends that I’ve been missing out my whole life.”

She then added:

There is something to be said for a man who���s simply had more time to get his shit together, and my much older boyfriend seems genuinely excited to be with me—not like he’s biding his time before he can swipe for someone better. He is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard.

After discussing how they “met at a birthday party” and bonded over their shared connection to Hawaii (among other things), Kelly clarified that the “age gap didn’t register at first” because she’d “met someone interesting and magnetic.” In fact, she “assumed” that they’d “just become friends,” and she agreed to exchange numbers with Kiedis so that they could get coffee together.

Interestingly, Kelly brought up how differences in gender might determine how people react to “age-gap relationships”:

I’ve noticed how differently people respond to age-gap relationships based on who occupies which side of the gap. Take Cher, who is dating someone decades younger than she is. Broadly speaking, the reaction is: “Good for her. A 79-year-old pop icon has earned the right to enjoy herself.” The inverse arrangement produces a different kind of commentary. An older man is reflexively labeled “creepy” and “gross,” while the woman “must have daddy issues” or must be a gold-digger. Is it really so difficult to imagine that connection can exist across generations, and that two people of different ages can find something real in each other?

“I’ve talked at great length about my own biases around age-gap relationships with my boyfriend, who has been in several,” Kelly revealed, acknowledging that “the less generous assumptions exist for a reason.”

In particular, she continued, “A difference in years often means a difference in experience, yes, but also in independence—and a relationship where one person provides the conditions for the other’s stability (financial, emotional, or otherwise) can set up a dangerous dynamic.”

Next, she dove into how dating Kiedis led to her meeting “a successful fashion designer and a film producer in similarly significant age-gap relationships” who’re “fully formed women whom no one would mistake for victims.” She also specified that she’s “not at risk of losing everything if [they] break up” since she’s already very successful and independent.

“If I were 18, or even 21, the scales would be weighted far differently,” she reflected.

Kelly then broadened her commentary to say that “power is annoyingly slippery” in general, whether it’s “the obvious kind” regarding money and property or how “emotional intelligence” can help someone “steer a conversation so smoothly the other person doesn’t realize it’s happened.” Either way, she surmised, “these things can create an imbalance that isn’t exclusive to relationships with large age gaps, but is easier to identify there.”

Then, she addressed people who have “extremely simple opinions” about power in relationships, especially regarding “the unsolicited commentary in public” that “happens in passing.”

She elaborated:

A question: “Is that your dad?” Or, directed at him, with a performative smile: “Your daughter is so beautiful.” The remarks come with a cheerful bluntness, suggesting a certain satisfaction at having correctly identified the matter at hand, and it’s incredibly awkward every time. There is no sense that anything has been overstepped. If anything, it’s the opposite: a pride in just saying the thing that others were probably thinking. And it hasn’t only been strangers: When I FaceTimed a friend to tell her about my relationship, she was visibly disappointed, as if I had violated some shared understanding of what my life was supposed to look like. We speak less now.

Near the end of her column, Kelly argued that relationships without a “dramatic age gap” still include their “own set of imbalances” yet usually avoid “the kind of scrutiny” her partnership with Kiedis “invites.” She expounded: “We [humanity] have a tendency to interrogate the unusual and excuse or explain away everything else.”

Finally, Kelly concluded:

For some, age-gap relationships inevitably function as a site onto which their broader anxieties—about power, aging, desirability and its perceived limits—can be projected. What people assume about me, about him, about the structure of our relationship, often reveals more about them than anything that exists between my boyfriend and me. The relationship itself becomes secondary to what it represents.

But the reality is comparatively unremarkable. From the inside, we’re mostly just two people doing the regular, ongoing work of moving through life together.

READ MORE: The Longest-Running Mainstream Rock Chart No. 1 of Each Year of the 2000s

Kiedis’ Prior “Age-Gap” Relationships

As Kelly acknowledged, Kiedis had “been in several” age-gap relationships before they met.

For instance – and we’re mentioning everything below purely for context, not judgment or editorialization – he dated actress Ione Skye (daughter of folk singer/songwriter Donovan) around 1986, when he was 24 and she was 16.

In fact, in his 2004 memoir Scar Tissue, Kiedis disclosed that “Under the Bridge” (from 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik) was inspired by his time dating Skye while he was battling drug addiction. "I had this beautiful angel of a girl [Ione Skye] who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with f---ing gangsters shooting speedballs under the bridge,” he wrote [via Loudwire].

In January of 2025, Skye even posted to Instagram an alternate version of the cover to 1989’s Mother’s Milk with her as the model.

“This was the original unused album cover with me, for the Chili Peppers ‘Mothers Milk’ album cover. They reshot it with another model because I looked ‘a little young,’” she wrote.

Kiedis also dated Melanie “Sporty Spice” C – who’s about 12 years younger than him – in the late 1990s (subsequently inspiring “Emit Remmus” from 1999’s Californication). Furthermore, he’s been involved with fashion designer Yohanna Logan (born in 1975); Australian model Helena Vestergaard (born in 1993); and actress Heather Christie (born in 1988).

Other Red Hot Chili Peppers News

Last month saw the official premiere of The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel, a new Netflix documentary centered around the band’s early years with original guitarist Hillel Slovak (who died from a heroin overdose in 1988).

You can view the trailer here.

How do you feel about what Kelly wrote? Let us know!