How to describe the legend that was Anthony Bourdain? Celebrity chef and gonzo journalist? Globe-trotting TV presenter turned social activist? How about drug-loving culinary bad boy? Tattooed tough guy or beautiful, vulnerable, codependent victim? Twice married, he worked his way up from some of New York’s seediest, mob-run establishments to the finest French bistros, battling cocaine and heroin addiction all the way.
Tony was a late developer, finally gaining his first book deal and TV show well into middle age. He traveled the world and fell in love with Asia. Italian actress Asia Argento, that is. And she changed his life forever. Some even believe she ended it. Today, we’ll touch on the psychology behind Bourdain’s troubled life to try and discover what led to his tragic demise.
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in Manhattan, New York, on June 25th, 1956. His wholesome parents were Gladys, a New York Times editor, and Pierre, a New York camera store salesman. Tony inherited his writing skills from his mom and his silver-tongued sales charm from his dad.
The future chef, author, and TV personality described his childhood in one of his later books: "I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me.” And yet, his later path of trauma, codependency, addiction, and despair must have come from somewhere, so maybe his childhood wasn’t a piece of cake.
Tony and his younger brother, Christopher, grew up in an egalitarian suburban family home in New Jersey. As they grew from boys to adolescents, their parents grew too, by climbing the social ladder. Pierre became an exec at Columbia Records, affording them the chance to travel, mostly to France. After all, their surname was Bourdain. Pierre’s mother had emigrated from France to New York after the First World War, so he grew up speaking the language and often visited his motherland.
During one summer vacation, a local French fisherman plucked an oyster from the water, shucked it, and handed it to young Tony. If this was a superhero origin story, then this was the exact moment Bourdain fell in love with food, to add to his passion for books, music, and movies. The boy was sold, hook, line, and sinker. Indeed, his first job was shucking oysters in a Cape Cod seafood shack. He later waxed lyrical about French cuisine: "France had runny, pungent cheeses and sausages that were marvelous!”
One tiny clue to Anthony’s dark future might lie in him feeling “jealous of the lack of parental supervision of his classmates and the freedom that they had in their homes.” This certainly suggests his parents were overprotective. Perhaps when he insists, “My parents loved me,” they put him on a pedestal.
He resented not facing the same trials and tribulations as his school friends, and his later writing frequently portrayed an alienated adolescence and a desire to escape his parents’ boring, conventional middle-class life. Ever the rebel, Tony felt pulled to the darkness, and started exhibiting self-destructive behavior from a young age.
“Wildly fascinated with drugs” from the age of ten, Bourdain says he took his first hit of acid aged 12 because he literally "wanted to be a junkie". This slippery psychedelic slope would herald an almost lifelong battle with narcotics that followed him around like a dark cloud.
At Dwight-Englewood High School, he fell in with a bad crowd and head over heels in love with party girl Nancy Putkoski. According to a New Yorker profile, he was “crazy about Putkoski.” He described Nancy as "a bad girl", who was "part of a druggy crowd". Yet, unlike most codependent high school crushes, this one lasted the test of time, despite many red flags.
Two years Tony's senior, Nancy graduated high school and went to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. In 1973, the long, frizzy-haired Bourdain finished school a year early to follow her; another sign that he lacked a healthy sense of self and didn't have faith in who he was or what he wanted.
The 2026 film Tony portrays a fictionalized account of this period. In the dramedy, Nancy tells Tony she's summering in Cape Cod. He shows up to surprise her, only to discover she's dating a local pizza delivery guy. We don’t know if these events really happened, but it certainly fits with Nancy’s wild child character and Tony’s puppy-dog naive loyalty.
In the movie, Tony gets his first kitchen job, washing dishes, under a crazy, junkie chef. In real life, Tony dropped out of Vassar to study at the illustrious Culinary Institute of America, a 15-minute drive from Nancy in Vassar, and graduated in 1978. That said, he once said in an interview he was expelled from Vassar because of a "depraved incident involving angry lesbians and firearms.” We dread to think what that was all about!
After graduating from chef school, Bourdain and Putkoski moved to New York City. They married in 1985 and stayed together for two decades. But it was a rocky road. The chemistry between them was… errr, chemical, and the couple never quite kicked their drug habit. Referring to himself and his wife as living “like Bonnie and Clyde,” he wrote, "We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to conceptualize."
Once, the NYPD pulled Tony over as he was transporting 200 acid tabs. Another time, picking up a “letter from Panama” from the post office, he clocked DEA agents surveilling him. Anthony was on a self-destructive path… and it was about to get a whole bunch worse.
Everyone knows The Big Apple eats you up and spits you out, and within two years, his life spiraled out of control. First, his parents separated after 26 years. At work, he was finally promoted to sous-chef, working with two close friends. But in the pressure cooker environment of professional cheffing, he turned to cocaine to stay awake during 12-hour shifts. Next, he gatewayed from stimulants to party drugs and then to heroin.
Between grueling shifts, he’d score from “crackheads” in the hood, where he was once mugged at gunpoint. And yet somehow – just like his father – he worked his way up the ranks in various New York kitchens. How did he achieve this feat while off his face on heroin? Well, he was what is called a high-functioning addict. Apparently, it’s not unusual for some heroin addicts to hold down high-powered jobs.
Even more impressive, he always chronicled the crazy adventures and the unseen, seedy underbelly of kitchen work. One head chef regularly hit on him and even got physical, until Anthony finally had enough and exacted his revenge! He drove a large carving fork between his boss’s hand at the knuckles. Bourdain never had to deal with his boss’s wandering hands again, and he totally earned respect from the rest of the kitchen staff.
Then one random day in a yellow NYC cab, he had a moment of clarity, or what alcoholic chefs call a moment of claret. One of his friends jokingly quoted a statistic that one in four addicts will never get the monkey off their back. Looking around the cab, Tony came to a morbid realization. Out of him and his three junkie friends, one of them wasn’t going to make it out alive… of addiction, not the cab! In that split second, he decided he wanted to be the one to survive. However, it was not going to be an easy ride… again, survival, not the cab!
Tony checked himself into a methadone program but unwisely still dabbled in other illicit substances. During a particularly dark period, he turned to crack cocaine. At his lowest points, he’d dig through the carpet with his fingernails, looking for minuscule rock remnants but would often find himself smoking chips of white paint. This smart, popular, charming, and up-and-coming young chef was now a desperate crack addict, but rock bottom was still waiting for him around the next corner.
Even addicted to smoking crack, he'd still show up on time. But, one Christmas he was so desperate for a hit, he put his entire, beloved record collection up for sale. Laying out his mostly punk rock music vinyl albums on a blanket on Broadway’s sidewalk, he offered the music he loved to passing strangers just so he could scrabble together enough money for a fix. After another epiphany, he finally managed to quit the crack, but in the words of Broadway’s finest son Irving Berlin... there may be trouble ahead.
After cleaning up and cheffing at three successive failed restaurants, Anthony fell into working for a boss he refers to only as ‘The Silver Shadow’. It turns out his restaurant empire was run by the mob, and Bourdain’s workplace was gangster HQ for all sorts of nefarious criminal activity. His line cooks were actually the boss’s cocaine dealers, meaning Tony was soon back on the coke and back at square one.
Fuelled by Bolivian marching powder, Head Chef Bourdain cleaned the place up and ‘The Silver Shadow’ liked the results. When Tony fired people, the boss saved money, so he promoted Tony to Head of HR in the OG’s HQ. But when Tony had to fire a young mentee he had a bond with, he fell into a deep depression. Eventually, Anthony reached boiling point and quit the kitchen, and he convinced himself that his time as a chef was over. But the gods weren’t done with this culinary bad boy just yet!
By 1987, Anthony had fallen back into less auspicious jobs, shucking shells in an East Village oyster bar. One day, he received devastating news from home. His father had died of a heart attack aged just 57. Pierre’s curiosity and sense of adventure had always been a huge influence on his son. Anthony was heartbroken, but knew he’d have bigger fish to fry one day.
Running from the huge responsibility of being Head Chef and having to fire his peers, Anthony took a series of increasingly lowly jobs in ever seedier New York kitchens until he ended up at another mob-run institution. Hurting and depressed, he turned to drugs yet again, which warped his sense of reality and made him paranoid. The mobster clientele liked the street-smart chef and one day, when Tony made a throwaway complaint about his boss to the dining gangsters, he became convinced he’d just accidentally ordered a hit on his boss! He fled soon after.
After a particularly dark period in the late 1980s, Tony got his life back on track thanks to a near-miraculous visit to Saint Martin in the Caribbean with Nancy in 1988. Reborn, this junkie mob chef finally got his sh*t together and enrolled in a writing workshop at Columbia University that same year. By the mid-1990s, things took another turn for the better when he landed a job as executive chef at a glamorous Tuscan restaurant run by a beloved restaurateur.
Believing this was his big break, he was only setting himself up for another fall. He had worked so hard to open the restaurant, but his restaurateur friend betrayed Tony by demoting him. Fortunately, it was only a blip, and he was back on his feet in less time than it takes to soft boil an egg.
In 1998, posh French restaurant Brasserie Les Halles on Park Avenue South, Manhattan hired Bourdain as executive chef. After almost twenty years of working his fingers to the bone, he had finally achieved his life’s purpose. These were no mobsters, and the management gave him free rein to serve his eclectic brand of French cuisine he could be proud of, run the kitchen how he wanted, and let him hire and fire people when he chose. Oh, they also respected him enough to give him time off.
He’d spent the last decade writing, and now he used this heretofore unknown concept - free time - to write two fiction crime novels, Bone in the Throat (1995), which tells the tale of an ambitious young sous-chef trapped between the mob and the FBI, and Gone Bamboo (1997).
Next, he wrote a darkly humorous essay about the inner workings of NYC kitchens. It was a cautionary, no-holds-barred tale for the city’s restaurant guests. But when he tried to find a publisher, he was all out of luck… until help arrived from his own, recently widowed, mother.
Remember we said Gladys worked for the New York Times? Well, after so many decades, the highly experienced editor knew a great piece of journalism when she read one. Now, neither she nor the Times could get away with running her own son’s essay, so she passed it on to an editor over at the New Yorker and urged him to run the piece. His mom’s act ushered in the second act of Anthony’s life. Without his mom’s persistence, he may never have become the cult figure we know, love, and miss today.
The New Yorker editor knew Gladys’ instincts were spot on; he knew he had to publish the piece immediately. One week after the New Yorker ran the story, Anthony had a $50,000 advance from a publisher to write his memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly… and it was just in the nick of time because - after years of sporadic jobs - he was up to his eyeballs in debt, taxes, and rent.
Tony’s first book chronicled his experience in a SoHo restaurant in 1981. He and his friends would get high at work, and send a busboy to Alphabet City to buy “cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and heroin.”
The funny, angsty, sharp, belligerent memoir sold like hot cakes, shifting millions of copies globally and spending 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The book’s success transformed Bourdain from a line chef in tens of thousands of dollars of debt into a million-dollar media personality… yet there were more trials and tribulations on the horizon.
Though she’s gone unmentioned for the majority of the last two decades of Anthony’s story, Nancy was a constant in his life. Throughout their many peaks and troughs; their addictions, and the bad jobs, Nancy Putkoski always had stood by her man. By this time, the hedonism of their cocaine-fuelled party lives in the 1980s had given way to a stay-at-home life of takeout food and watching The Simpsons reruns from the couch.
Surprisingly, by the time he reached middle age, Tony wasn't well-traveled. Apart from his annual Caribbean vacation with Nancy and one work trip to Tokyo, he hadn’t seen much of the world. But now he was published, he was determined to change all that.
For his next book, he wanted to travel the world, documenting his experiences. Then he had a flash of inspiration: why not make a TV show? In his own inimitable gonzo-style, he pitched the idea to producers as: "I travel around the world, eat a lot of sh*t, and basically do whatever the f**k I want".
Kitchen Confidential changed Bourdain’s life forever, but it came with a heartbreaking side-effect. Nancy had fought his corner for 20 years, but when producers began sniffing around her husband to host a globe-trotting TV show, she had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
His next book, A Cook's Tour (2001), led to a TV show of the same name which debuted in January 2002, and ran for 35 episodes. However, this newfound fame ripped apart his relationship with Nancy. He tried everything to save their marriage: He renovated their home and even flew back from Japan to cook the family Christmas dinner.
But it was too little, too late. His burning ambition had created a huge chasm. In 2005, they separated and divorced. Anthony was heartbroken. Nancy had been his rock for almost three decades, and the divorce had left everyone's half-macho, half-vulnerable TV chef borderline suicidal.
To the outside world, larger-than-life Anthony Bourdain was full of confidence, knowledge, insight, and laughter. Legions of fans followed his books and novels, and No Reservations ran for eight seasons from 2005 to 2012. Yet, behind all the passion, bravado, machismo, cigarettes, and booze - he often used alcohol to break the ice with the people he interviewed - Tony was still a hot mess. The divorce had ripped away his soul to the point that he’d revisit the Caribbean, where he’d holidayed with Nancy.
One night, after drinking, tragedy almost took him. During a drunken drive home on Saint Martin, he felt the sudden and overwhelming urge to drive off the edge of a cliff. As if by magic, at the last moment, heading towards oblivion, a song he’d always loved came on the radio.
The song was the wonderful 11-minute banger "Time Has Come Today" by the brilliant African American Los Angeles psychedelic rock n’soul band the Chambers Brothers. Tony took this as an omen, believing his time was yet to come, and snapped the steering wheel back in line, setting him on the right path. Until the next time…
In 2006, Anthony visited Beirut, Lebanon, to investigate the city’s vibrant nightlife for an episode of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations. Everything was going tickety-boo until days into the shoot, the 2006 Lebanon War broke out and Israel launched silo after silo of missile strikes at the city. The chef and his crew scrambled for safety at their hilltop hotel and watched Beirut burn. The crew were trapped for over a week as missiles rained down around them, they needed an escape plan, quicksmart!
Eventually, their local fixers got the crew to a beach, where they were evacuated by the U.S. Marine ship. From the ship, the crew watched locals crowd the shoreline, fleeing from their burning homes. The episode formed the show’s most harrowing and memorable scenes, and was nominated for an Emmy. But missiles weren’t the only thing in the air…
Tony became great friends with French chef, writer, and TV personality Éric Ripert. Understanding how lonely and depressed Anthony was after his divorce, Éric set him up on a blind date with Sardinian restaurant hostess Ottavia Busia, general manager at New York’s Geisha restaurant.
Éric hoped that a night on the town with a smart lady would cheer his buddy up, but everyone got more than they bargained for! On their second date, 50-year-old Anthony and 28-year-old Busia got matching tattoos (*red flag, red flag, abort!), marking the start of an intense relationship.
The pair had been dating for eight months when Anthony went to Beirut. When he returned – shaken to the core by what he witnessed – he was a different man. He and Nancy never had children, but he and Ottavia decided to “spin the wheel” and see what happened.
On April 9th, 2007, Ottavia welcomed a daughter they named Ariane. Eleven days later, they married. Fatherhood changed Tony again, for the better. With a daughter to care for, he discovered a newfound lease on life, but his struggles were far from over…
Despite his carefully crafted, self-assured TV persona, Tony was a melancholic, deeply self-critical codependent and a massive people pleaser. With fame, everyone wanted a piece of Bourdain, so he usually said yes, even when he knew he was stretched too thin, like butter spread over too much bread, as fellow food-lover Bilbo Baggins might say.
Between shooting No Reservations, writing, editing, and book tours, he was away from his new family 250 days a year. Busia and Ariane often joined him, but that became untenable when their daughter started elementary school.
Inspired by his wife’s dedication to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Tony earned a blue belt. BJJ training was one of the few times they got to spend together. Just as with his first marriage to Nancy, being continents away from his family for months at a time took its toll.
History, you see, has a way of repeating itself, especially for addicts. Tony had finally quit his two-pack-a-day smoking habit... but as his work schedule impacted his relationship with Ottavia, he started smoking again.
In 2016, the White House reached out to ask if Anthony could join the president for a meal for Parts Unknown. Eventually, after months of planning, in May 2016, Bourdain and President Barack Obama sat down in a tiny local noodle shop called Bún Chả Hương Liên in Hanoi, Vietnam.
They shared a $6 meal of bún chả (grilled pork with noodles) and supped on an ice-cold Hanoi beer. After their meal, Anthony told Obama he was going for a drive on his scooter, and he said he could see the envy in the President’s eyes!
Tony went to France to write but picked up a nasty skin infection. After three painful days, a doctor prescribed him medication, which he took on an empty stomach. Within minutes, he blacked out and came to in the doorway of a restaurant to see a kneeling waiter trying to revive him.
This funny turn reminded him of his father’s sudden heart attack. Tony was a month off his 60th birthday, and already two years older than his father when he died. For Tony, this was another wake-up call.
Terrified and forced into action, that same night, Anthony composed a long, heartfelt email to Nancy, apologizing for the many ways he’d mistreated her. His many failures in the relationship haunted him, and his brush with death made him desperate to change for the better. But he was apologizing to the wrong woman…
In September 2016, Anthony and Ottavia announced their separation after nine years of marriage. Ottavia explained that due to their careers and heavy travel schedules, they had been living an "unconventional relationship" for years. The split was amicable, and they continued to focus on raising their daughter, Ariane. Ironically, Tony was promoting a family recipe book called Appetites: A Cookbook when they split.
Then, in late 2016, the travel show host’s life changed forever. Tony met 41-year-old Italian actress, singer, and director Asia Argento while filming an episode of his show Parts Unknown in Rome, Italy. Anthony fell head over heels with the tattooed temptress daughter of horror maestro Dario Argento and was determined not to mess up another relationship.
They made a handsome celebrity couple, and to the outside world, they were clearly desperately in love. But behind the scenes, Tony’s friends were worried. One close source told People magazine: "He was madly in love with Asia. Like a teenage boy just absolutely lovestruck.”
The next year, Asia Argento came forward to say that film producer Harvey Weinstein had raped her during Cannes Film Festival in 1997 when she was 21. In the wake of hers - and dozens of other women’s - allegations against the serial sexual predator, Tony bravely raised his head above the parapet to become one of the leading male voices to take responsibility for mankind’s toxic masculinity and support of the #MeToo movement.
Ottavia Busia said she originally believed her ex-husband’s public crusade was “very noble,” but added, “he became obsessed with it.” Tony was one of the first to speak out about Mario Batali, which stemmed back to his time working in NYC kitchens. It was Anthony’s attempt to fight back at the “meathead bro culture” he’d once been a part of. Yet, while people respected him for standing up to be counted, his personal connection to the #MeToo movement would come back to haunt him.
Juggling his work schedule, celebrity status, and his role as a father with being head over heels in love with Asia Argento wore Anthony down. His behavior became more erratic, worrying his family and friends, especially his ex-wife Ottavia. He lashed out at his friend David Chang by telling him he wouldn’t make a good father. He told another friend he was feeling under so much pressure, he was suffering from agoraphobia - the fear of open spaces. Finally, Bourdain sought help from a therapist.
After his fame helped him leave many failed relationships in his wake, Bourdain took drastic measures to ensure he had enough time for Argento. He organized a “dramatic” meeting with trusted collaborators where he told them he was going to end their long-term partnership. When they agreed to his demands, he quickly reneged, But things were about to get real messy…
Parts Unknown was all prepped to film in Hong Kong when the show’s director fell ill. Bourdain pushed for his girlfriend to step in to direct, but things quickly went south. After Argento argued with the show’s trusted cinematographer, Bourdain fired him. The whole crew was shell-shocked as this was completely out of character. Asia had changed Tony.
It was plain to everyone that their first collaboration was an unmitigated disaster. Everyone except Anthony, who, by this time, was sporting a new “Asia Argento tattoo”. Those are his own words, although the tattoo reminds us more of Jared Leto’s The Joker, which speaks volumes.
That said, other crew members reminisced about how happy their star was to work with his girlfriend. His friends told stories about how in love he was with her. They didn’t mention if his love was reciprocated. While other friends “were worried about Anthony Bourdain's crazy love for Asia Argento … like, he was crazy in love with her, crazy being the keyword … He would have done anything for her, and that was a little red flag for some of his friends.”
Anthony had made 11 seasons of Parts Unknown without so much as a crossed word with the tight-knit crew… until Asia Argento came along.
Despite the trouble, he waxed lyrical about filming the Hong Kong episode, describing it as “the most intensely satisfying experience of my professional life and a show that I am giddily, ecstatically proud of”. For the first time in a long time, he was happy… but Asia Argento was about to pull the rug from under him.
In the first week of June 2018, tabloids published paparazzi photos of Asia in the arms of journalist Hugo Clément in Rome. The photos showed them hugging, holding hands, smiling, strolling through the Italian capital, and even dancing in a restaurant.
That week, Anthony had been filming an episode of Parts Unknown in Strasbourg, in the historic northeastern French region of Alsace with Éric Ripert. The great friends stayed at Le Chambard Hotel in Kaysersberg.
He was so troubled by the photographs, he posted an Instagram story showing the title sequence from the Italian Poliziotteschi film Violent City (1970), a revenge film that begins with paparazzi photos of a woman cheating on her husband.
On June 8th, 2018, Bourdain missed his dinner and breakfast, so Éric went to his hotel room to check on his close friend. Presumably having asked reception for a key, he opened the door and walked into his friend’s room to find Tony dead in his room. The 61-year-old had hanged himself.
Tributes flooded in from shocked politicians, actors, comedians, news anchors, musicians, film directors, and fellow chefs paid homage to their fallen friend; everyone from Barack Obama, Gordon Ramsay, best friend Éric Ripert, Chrissy Teigen, Larry King, Megyn Kelly, Jake Tapper, Bryan Cranston, Mandy Moore, Iggy Pop, Jamie Oliver, Tom Colicchio, Nigella Lawson, Patton Oswalt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Darren Aronofsky, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Billy Idol and many more paid their respects. Even Donald Trump and Piers Morgan were unusually magnanimous!
Josh Homme, the frontman of Queens of the Stone Age - who provided theme music for Parts Unknown - posted a heartbroken message and dedicated a live performance of "Long Slow Goodbye" to his "brother Tony”. To put it simply, Bourdain touched the lives of so many people.
Millions of fans across the world who never even met him were just as devastated. Tony’s brother Christopher remembers collecting flowers and cards fans had left outside New York’s Brasseries Les Halles, including one from a woman who drove all the way from Tennessee.
But the most heartbreaking epithet came from Anthony’s mother: “He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this … He had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams.”
Hours after her boyfriend's suicide, Asia Argento gave a statement where she referred to Anthony as 'my love, my rock, my protector.'
In the following weeks, another source close to Tony explained to People magazine: “None in our circle of friends knew he was struggling in any life-or-death way. Honestly, I don’t think anyone knew. I don’t think Éric knew the depths of his pain. The shock of Tony’s death is almost as profound as the pain. Even his closest friends are still waiting for some mystery to be uncovered. We knew his nerves were shattered a little; his marriage had fallen apart, he was way, way overworked and overdriven, but unstable… No one had a clue.”
They say there are five stages of grief. After denial, comes anger. And with anger comes looking for someone to blame. Many pointed accusatory fingers towards Argento, who had spent several months grieving before finally breaking her silence.
In a tearful video interview with the U.K.’s Daily Mail newspaper, Asia explained: “People say I murdered him. They say I killed him.” Then, she dropped a twenty-megaton bombshell. Asia claimed she and Anthony were in an open relationship, before admitting she’d cheated on him.
Asia continued: “He cheated on me too. It wasn’t a problem for us.… He was a man who traveled 265 days a year. When we saw each other, we took really great pleasure in each other’s company. But we are not children. We are grown-ups.… Anthony was 62 [he was actually 61 when he died]. I was 42.… We had lives, we had wives and husbands, we had children. I cannot think of Anthony as somebody who would do an extreme gesture like this for something like that.”
Asia’s good friend, Rose McGowan, backed up her open relationship claims, saying the couple “loved without borders of traditional relationships, and they established the parameters of their relationship early on. Asia is a free bird, and so was Anthony.” McGowan’s words starkly contrasted Anthony’s friends’ image of a lovestruck teenage boy who “had an addiction to Asia Argento” and spoke of one day moving in with her.
Asia’s nuclear bombshell that they were in an open relationship just doesn't make any sense and raised many more questions. How can one cheat if they’re in a polygamous relationship? Did she accidentally reveal the truth by using the word cheated? Did she realize her mistake and try to cover her Freudian slip by saying that Tony also cheated on her?
Also, if they were into free-love, why was Tony so furious and devastated that he would take his own life when he found out she was with another man? Phone records show that Bordain had argued with Argento in the days after the photos of her with Hugo Clément were published, and Argento ended their relationship in the days before his suicide.
Nothing about her story added up. But the controversy surrounding Asia didn’t end there… because where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
In August 2018, two months after Anthony’s suicide, the New York Times published a story alleging sexual assault victim Asia Argento was also guilty of sexual assault. Worse, she had convinced Tony to secretly pay $380,000 to her accuser, Jimmy Bennett, a former child actor who once played her son in a 2004 movie.
Bennett accused her of sexually assaulting him years earlier in a California hotel room two months after his 17th birthday. The age of consent in California is 18. Asia was 37 at the time.
Asia denied any inappropriate contact with Bennett, but admitted Tony had paid Bennett off for her. Issuing a statement in which she misspelled her late boyfriend’s name, Asia insisted: “Antony [sic] insisted the matter be handled privately, and this was also what Bennett wanted. Anthony was afraid of the possible negative publicity that such a person, whom he considered dangerous, could have brought upon us. We decided to deal compassionately with Bennett’s demand for help and give it to him.”
Remember, Anthony said he would do anything for Asia Argento? Well, their relationship started off with him supporting her as an outspoken proponent of the #MeToo movement. It ended with him paying off an actor who claims she sexually assaulted him when he was a minor.
Seeing the love of his life smiling, dancing, and in the arms of another man broke Tony. Argento didn’t kill him, but leading a double life, as narcissists do, she tipped him over the edge. The sordid allegations against Asia and his involvement in the pay-off also gravely affected Tony’s mental health. Ironically, the 2004 film Asia appeared with seven-year-old Jimmy Bennett, was called The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.
In June 2021, the documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain premiered, featuring close friends and colleagues, some of whom kicked the hornet’s nest in several different ways. First, the film’s director, Morgan Neville, needed three of Tony’s quotes, but there was no footage. So, Neville sent all his audio clips of Bourdain to a software company so artificial intelligence could recreate the dead celebrity chef’s voice.
When the controversy broke, commentators questioned the morals of bringing the chef back from the grave. Neville claimed he’d been granted consent to create and use the A.I. voice from “Bourdain’s widow.” Ottavia Busia, who broke her long silence to speak about her ex-husband in the film, tweeted: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.” Not content with stirring the pot, Neville flew out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Roadrunner spills many secrets from Bourdain’s final few months, and makes two major implications. One is that the normally affable host became tempestuous, belligerent, and so difficult to work with, that his formerly tight, happy crew complained about him on camera. The documentary also heavily implies that Anthony’s fraught relationship with Asia Argento was what drove him to commit suicide.
Neville gave Argento no right to reply in the film. After reading Anatomy of a Wild Heart (Anatomia di un cuore selvaggio), the 2021 autobiography she released in Italy, the documentarian claimed her inclusion would make the story “too complicated” and that Asia would only say, “People don’t understand me and our relationship. I loved him.” Finally, Neville stated that if he included her side of the story, his film would become a she-said/he-said litigation, and be bogged down in “narrative quicksand.”
When Bourdain took his own life, a tidal wave of shock and grief went around the globe. No one, not even his closest friends didn’t know the pain he’d been living through. But it wasn't the first time Tony had experienced this darkness; he had witnessed it many times before.
In 2001, The Guardian interviewed him about his book Kitchen Confidential, whereupon the nascent author displayed his disgust with fame and demonstrated his reticence to accept his newfound popularity.
In the same interview, he also said something eerily prescient. Recalling Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, Bourdain told the interviewer: “Don’t worry. It won’t finish with me sticking a gun in my mouth. This is a self-loathing I can live with.” Filmmaker Neville later told Rolling Stone magazine he believed the celebrity chef’s suicide was “a very unpremeditated act.
There's been much speculation about the state of Bourdain’s mental health and the stresses and strains of his relationship in his final days, but since only he and Asia Argento were present, we’ll sadly never uncover any real answers. However, one man who got to know both sides of Anthony and Asia’s relationship was Roadrunner director Morgan Neville.
In the same Rolling Stone interview, Neville stated, “I want to be clear: I don’t think Asia made Tony kill himself; somebody even says that in the film. She was a fiery character, and Tony was looking for that. He says in the film, ‘I’m dating a crazy Italian actress, and it’s not going to end well.’” So, in summary, Tony knew dating Asia Argento was playing with fire.
Anthony Bourdain was never simply a celebrity chef. Mixing his superlative food knowledge with genuine awe, his TV shows changed the way audiences saw food, transforming cooking shows into epic, emotional, educational, entertaining odysseys through people and places.
Tony overcame cocaine and heroin addiction to become the world’s most loved food and travel writer and TV adventurer. He wrote and presented with a sharp, maverick voice, and an unapologetic love of all cultures and cuisines. Yet beneath the confidence, there was a vulnerable, childlike codependent… who danced too close to the narcissist’s flame.
Released by A24, Tony is the fictionalized tale of young Anthony Bourdain’s summer in 1975. Directed by Matt Johnson, starring Dominic Sessa as Bourdain, the comedy drama is in movie theaters from August 21st, 2026.
And finally, if you are having suicidal thoughts, you can call 988 in the USA, 116 123 in the UK, or click here to find your national suicide prevention hotline. Please pick up the phone and talk to someone… help is at hand.