The reality show chef accused of ‘ghosting’ his pregnant wife and abandoning their children has surfaced in Texas where he’s working as a personal chef for Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Sheridan’s wife Nicole, 41, posted a video clip of the erstwhile missing chef Charles Withers and quickly took it down – but not before a TikTok user copied it and shared it online.
Withers’s wife, Ashley McGuire, accused him at the weekend of abandoning his family and disappearing.
She posted her saga on social media Saturday, asking for internet sleuths to help find him. Within a day, Nicole’s video clip of him popped up online.
And now she has found him, she is going ahead with the divorce.
She told TMZ Withers texted her once her plea had gone viral – and now he is willing to sit down and talk.
Taylor Sheridan, 54, did not respond to a request for comment, but had his PR person reach out to DailyMail.com.
The spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny that Withers was working for him.
But McGuire, 32, told DailyMail.com that she has now confirmed her 29-year-old husband is living in Texas and believes that he is working for Sheridan.
McGuire, who lives with her kids in Plymouth, Massachusetts, took to Facebook’s popular Are We Dating The Same Guy? group to make several incredible accusations about her husband, who appeared on the Food Network show Chopped in 2022.
The scorned mom-of-two said that she was pregnant when Charles went missing, adding: ‘He has one baby he hasn’t seen in over a year and one he’s never met.’
Ashley wrote that he was ‘gone without a trace’ and that she now wanted to harness the ‘power’ of social media to track him down and finalize a divorce.
She wrote: ‘I am really about to test the power of Facebook with this one…
‘This is my husband, Charles Withers. He loves to be the center of attention but I’m not sure how much he’s going to like this.
‘Last year, when I was pregnant with our youngest baby, he decided being a husband and a dad wasn’t the lifestyle he wanted anymore and he ghosted, like gone without a trace.
‘He has one baby he hasn’t seen in over a year and one he’s never met. He’s moved somewhere out of state and changed his phone number.’
She continued: ‘Divorcing someone who’s completely unreachable is really tough and drawn out, so I’m trying to track him down to get his signature on a few papers so I can finally close this chapter and move on with my life.
‘I’ve heard he is going by “Charlie” now. He’s British and charming as f**k. He’s a chef and probably never mentioned having a wife of kids back in Massachusetts.
‘If you know him, if you’re working with him, if you’re dating him or friends with him, can you please have him get in touch with me or let me know where I can find him.’
Ashley’s post concluded: ‘A friend of a friend has got to know where he is.’
Withers had been a rising star in the culinary world.
He had been at the helm of the C Salt Wine Bar and Grille in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
DailyMail.com has learned that Withers abandoned the restaurant last summer, leaving staff and creditors in the lurch, and went into rehab in the Boston area. He also ghosted another restaurant he was about to open, sources tell DailyMail.com.
‘He drove the business into the ground, then he just left,’ aformer co-owner of C Salt told DailyMail.com. ‘He owed me and my husband a lot of money. Then he just left.’
‘He had a drug problem,’ added the co-owner who sold the business to Withers in 2021 on credit. ‘We were contacted by his parents and they were doing an intervention, trying to save his life.’
‘The mom said they were trying to handle things for him while he got well,’ the former owner added. ‘Then the parents learned the extent of his debt and that he was trying to open a second restaurant while still owing us.
‘He even obtained a liquor license for that second restaurant. He took investors’ money. It never opened.’
Veteran attorney Theodore Schilling, who represented Withers at the time, confirmed the account.
He told DailyMail.com: ‘I was totally flabbergasted by what happened. It was a mystery what was going on in his head. We were supposed to close on that second restaurant, and then he was gone, and I haven’t seen him since.
‘His wife called me in distress after that,’ Schilling continued. ‘This is my 51st year in practice, and I’ve never run across anything like Charles. If he called me, I’d offer him good advice, but I don’t think he’d take it.
‘It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever dealt with.’
Withers has apparently been looking for love since leaving his wife. One woman he contacted on the dating app Bumble told DailyMail.com that he had messaged her, his location was tracked to two Texan towns, Weatherford and Guthrie. Sheridan has properties in both those towns.
He told her he worked as a personal chef, she said. Their online conversations did not lead to a date, she added.
Ashley’s post sent the internet into a frenzy – as dozens of women rallied round.
In a TikTok clip shared in the aftermath of the furor by Mary Katherine Sampleswas just one of many to unpack the situation.
‘Ashley McGuire made a Facebook post asking the world to help find her missing husband Charlie Withers who she believes just abandoned his family – two children.
‘It’s been a year since he left town. He hasn’t contacted the family. What the heck Charlie? Where are you?
‘Last thing we know he had opened a restaurant in Massachusetts where he was the chef, sold a crap ton of gift cards and then just took the money and closed up shop leaving all the customers and employees out in the dark with unpaid wages and unusable gift cards.’
And Jennifer Shuskha, who posts on Tik Tok under the name Jay Megan, and calls herself an ‘internet sleuth’ posted Nicole Sheridan’s picture to Tik Tok on Monday.
‘Would you look at that. It’s Charles Withers, America’s scumbag,’ she said.
‘I’m sure Nicole would be very interested to know what’s going on with her private chef. Last thing we’d want is for her and her husband to be tricked into some investment partnership.
‘So who wants to go let her know?’