Lisa Wilkinson lifts lid on her last day at Nine, final encounter with Karl Stefanovic and how she was abruptly dismissed
Lisa Wilkinson has sensationally lifted the lid on her pay-based split with Nine and her awkward final encounter with ratings-smashing Today partner Karl Stefanovic.
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Former Today show host Lisa Wilkinson has sensationally lifted the lid on her split with Channel 9, her bizarre last day at the station and her awkward final encounter with her ratings-smashing desk partner Karl Stefanovic.
In an extensively detailed exclusive extract from her forthcoming autobiography, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, Wilkinson confirms that she was indeed dismissed by Nine on that Monday in October 2017, contrary to earlier reports she had simply left.
She received the news that she was off Today with immediate effect in a phone call from her manager, who had just met Nine’s CEO to discuss her pay and conditions, while she did grocery shopping.
“I had just been dismissed from Channel 9. Effective immediately,” she writes. “I wasn’t in tears. I wasn’t anything. Apart from numb. Did I really just get sacked? The same woman Nine was apparently so proud of, they had recently started lining me up for next year’s Gold Logie?
“While news of my dismissal was still hours from going public, the humiliation I felt at that moment was overwhelming.”
The extract, carried in The Sunday Telegraph and other News Corp papers, indicates the split was caused by Wilkinson’s determination to tackle the gender pay gap that put Stefanovic on a much higher salary than her, despite their shared Today duties and ratings success.
It also reveals that her relationship with Stefanovic – with whom she’d had great on-screen chemistry for more than ten years – suddenly tanked during what would turn out to be their final show, the morning before the dismissal call, while Wilkinson struggled to work out what was going on.
She reveals she was already irritated that Stefanovic had not turned up to her 25th wedding anniversary vow renewal event days earlier, pulling out with partner Jas at the last moment yet not saying anything about it to Wilkinson personally.
That irritation turned to hurt when, with the cameras rolling, he suddenly said: “Didn’t you get married again while you were away? Congratulations!”
His “uncaring disregard” hurt deeply, she writes. “What was this thing Karl and I had between us? I’d presumed that along with our work relationship, there was a friendship as well. I must have been wrong.”
Worse was to come as she realised she had been left with almost nothing to do in the show’s running order, yet got no answers from the executive producer when she repeatedly asked why.
“What the heck was going on? To say I was having a rotten morning would be an understatement,” she writes. “For two hours, I sat there feeling completely useless. The Today Show was now The Karl Show.”
It was only later, she said, after the phone call from her manager, “that the penny dropped” about the weird atmosphere at the studio earlier that day.
Yet just hours later, Wilkinson was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by announcing she had a new job at Ten.
How that happened, and much more, is revealed in In Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, by Lisa Wilkinson, published by HarperCollins. It is out on November 3 and available to pre-order now at Booktopia.
Originally published as Lisa Wilkinson lifts lid on her last day at Nine, final encounter with Karl Stefanovic and how she was abruptly dismissed
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