Anderson Cooper says ex-partner will co-parent son

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper reiterated on Tuesday that he and his ex-partner are co-parenting Cooper's newborn son. He had mentioned it in passing on a talk show earlier this month.

"I don't really have a family and so my friends become my family and this is somebody I was involved with for 10 years. He's a great guy. We didn't work out as a couple," Cooper, 52, said Tuesday on Howard Stern's SiriusXM radio show, referring to nightclub owner Benjamin Maisani. The newsman had announced in March 2018 that after 10 years together, the couple had broken up "some time ago."

Cooper — son of the late fashion icon Gloria Vanderbilt and writer Wyatt Emory Cooper, who died when Anderson was 10 — explained that, "When I was a little kid, it was just my mom and my brother," Carter, who died by suicide in July 1988, at age 23. "My mom," he went on, "she was not the most parental person. I wished some adult, after my dad died, had stepped in and just been like, 'You know what? I'll take you to a ballgame' or 'Let's go out to lunch every now and then and let's just talk.' No one ever did that, and so I thought, well, if something ever happens to me, or even if something doesn't happen to me, if more people love my son and are in his life, I'm all for that."

Cooper, who announced on April 30 that his son Wyatt Morgan Cooper had been born via surrogacy three days earlier, had revealed on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on May 4 that Maisani had been in the delivery room and was "going to be a co-parent to Wyatt even though we're not together anymore. But, y'know, he's my family, and I want him to be Wyatt's family as well."

"I think it's good to have two parents, if you can," Cooper told Stern. Maisani, who was born in France, is "going to speak in French to the kid and he's going to be, I think, [called] 'Papa' or 'Pop' or whatever, and I think I'll be 'Dad,' 'Daddy.' "

"As a gay kid, I never thought it would be possible to have a child,” Cooper had written in Wyatt’s birth announcement on Instagram, "and I'm grateful for all those who have paved the way, and for the doctors and nurses and everyone involved in my son's birth."