Lisa Wilkinson claims Karl Stefanovic ditched her in pay negotiations

Lisa Wilkinson lifts the lid on she and Karl Stefanovic’s high-stakes pay negotiations in the latest explosive extract from her book.

Lisa Wilkinson opens up about the money issues that led to her dismissal from the Nine Network in the latest explosive extract from her upcoming memoir, published in The Daily Telegraph today.

Wilkinson abruptly left her job as co-host of Nine’s Today Show in 2017, during behind-the-scenes contract negotiations she says were aimed at getting pay parity with her longtime co-host, Karl Stefanovic.

In a new extract from her autobiography It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, Wilkinson claims her co-host proposed they negotiate over pay together – before ditching her to make his own multimillion-dollar deal.

“Karl said that with Georgie (Gardner) gone, and Ben (Fordham) having left to concentrate more on his radio career outside of Nine, we were the heart and soul of the show,” Wilkinson writes in the extract, published in The Daily Telegraph.

Wilkinson says her co-host suggested a “Friends-style” deal together – then went off on his own. Picture: Renee Nowytarger.

“Without us, he said, the network would be screwed. They needed us like never before. He wanted us to present to Nine as one entity, an unbreakable duo, with a dual contract on equal pay.”

She claims Stefanovic proposed a “Friends-style” negotiation tactic. The six core cast members from hit sitcom 90s Friends famously banded together as the show took off, each negotiating the same salary and vowing that if one of them quit, they all would. It proved to be a hugely successful formula, with the show running for 10 seasons and each of the cast members earning upwards of $US1m an episode in later seasons.

But, Wilkinson writes, Stefanovic’s initial suggestion in August 2015 to emulate the Friends cast was soon cast aside, despite her efforts to move forward. Instead, she – along with the rest of the public – read the news in December that year that Stefanovic had signed a new $2m deal to stay with Nine, after rumours that he was considering jumping ship to Seven.

Karl and Lisa at lunch together shortly after her 2017 axing from Today. Picture: Instagram

“He (Karl) had played both networks off against each other brilliantly and in full public view,” she writes. “There was no doubt about it: Karl certainly knew the art of the deal.”

Wilkinson writes that the new deal meant her co-host would be earning more than double what she was. She says their pay gap was “so off the charts that no-one would have believed it – and much bigger than that figure that had been conveniently leaked”.

The Nine Network’s chief executive officer, Hugh Marks, hit out at Wilkinson in The Daily Telegraph just days after her October 2017 dismissal, claiming that Wilkinson was offered a $1.8 million salary package, but wanted $2.3 million – pushing her well above Stefanovic’s annual salary of $2 million.

“I went to an incredible amount of trouble to build that [$1.8 million] package for her. She wanted $2.3 million. It wasn’t a $200,000 shortfall to [Karl’s] $2 million magic number. It was $500,000,” Marks told the Daily Telegraph at the time.

In other headline-making excerpts from her new book, Wilkinson opens up about the day she was axed from Nine, following a bizarre episode of Today that saw her sidelined throughout the show without explanation.

Shopping that afternoon in a local supermarket, she received a call from her manager to tell her she was “permanently off the show. Never to appear again”.

Wilkinson is spilling the beans on her time at Nine as she hits the publicity trail for her upcoming memoir, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, out November 3. Lisa Wilkinson has teased that she leaves “no stone unturned” in the autobiography, which runs to almost 500 pages and tracks her incredible rise through Australia’s media ranks, from being the youngest editor of Dolly magazine at just 21, to becoming the international editor-in-chief of Cleo, to her move into the TV world in the 90s and beyond.

Originally published as Lisa Wilkinson claims Karl Stefanovic ditched her in pay negotiations