Lisa Ling has recalled the "weird interaction" she had with Prince back in the early 2000s.
During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday night to promote her six-part documentary series Take Out, host Jimmy asked about the time the Purple Rain hitmaker reached out to the TV journalist after he had spotted her on talk show The View.
"He gets on the phone. I hear this voice, you know, this kind of soft voice, and it was him. I could tell clearly. He asked me if I wanted to go to the TLC concert with him. So, I'm like, 'Yeah! Yes, I would love to.' So, he said, 'I'm going to send a car to pick you up, come to my hotel, ask for Karl Marx, and they'll let you come up to my room.' He registered as Karl Marx," she recounted, referring to the German philosopher. "I go up. He opens the door, and he is a pretty diminutive guy, and he looked at my shoes, and he said, 'I really like your shoes.' It felt like he wanted to try them on, but I thought that would be weird!"
Lisa went on to detail how they went to the TLC gig and then headed back to his hotel. And while she wouldn't recommend going to a stranger's room, the 48-year-old felt "pretty confident" she would be fine as the musician was "going through his Jehovah's Witness stage".
"So, we ended up talking until five in the morning about philosophy and having these very, very serious discussions. And that was it. I left Karl Marx's room and went back, and he asked me to come over the next day again. And so, I went over there, and we talked until five o'clock in the morning. Had a great, incredibly stimulating discussion," she remembered.
However, Lisa's brief relationship with Prince came to a grinding halt after he saw her on The View the following day, and she spoke about a past boyfriend.
"I got a call at five o'clock the next morning, and it was Prince calling himself, the guy didn't call, and he said, 'Who were you talking about?' And I said, 'I was talking about someone in my past.' As though we were, like, we had a relationship or something. But I was talking about someone in my past. And that was it. He never called me. That was my relationship with Prince," she continued, adding: "It was really strange. I mean, I still to this day think that he is the greatest artist who ever lived. But it was a little bit of a weird interaction that we had over the course of a couple days."
Prince died at the age of 57 in 2016.
