Leigh Sales deletes Twitter account after interview with Scott Morrison

Renowned ABC host Leigh Sales has made a surprising move months after revealing the brutal toll of her job.

Renowned ABC host Leigh Sales has deleted her Twitter account a week after interviewing Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Sales has previously been vocal against online abuse, penning an article in late 2021 calling out online trolls, revealing she was being abused at an hourly rate on Twitter.

“It is non-stop, personal, often vile, frequently unhinged and regularly based on fabrications,” she wrote.

“It has the effect of an angry phone call from a politician magnified thousands of times over.

“Anyone who can stomach wading into mentions of @leighsales will find that virtually hourly, I am abused for doing my job, with a stream of tweets goading me to quit, demanding the ABC sack me, telling me I’m useless, stupid, biased and incompetent.”

ABC News Breakfast presenter Lisa Millar has also left Twitter over relentless abuse.

“It reached new heights of ridiculousness in the fortnight before I quit, when I came in for criticism for allegedly smiling while introducing a 20-second clip of John Howard speaking about Afghanistan,” Millar said in September.

“Soon after, I quietly deactivated my account for 30 days. I wasn’t making a big deal of this. I wasn’t aggro against the trolls.

“I decided to take control of a worsening situation, and minimise my exposure by removing myself from the platform altogether.”

It came shortly after Sales revealed she’d be leaving the ABC, closing the book on a more-than 11-year stint at the helm of the news program.

Leigh Sales' Twitter handle has disappeared.

‘It is non-stop, personal, often vile, frequently unhinged and regularly based on fabrications,’ Sales wrote in 2021.

The outgoing 7.30 host announced in February she would be handing the reins over to a new presenter once the federal election had passed.

The 48-year-old hinted at the toll the coronavirus pandemic had taken on her young family, saying her sons James and Daniel had “only ever known their mum at work four nights a week”.

Insiders told The Australian’s Media Diary that the challenges of juggling work and parenting duties might have indeed played a role in the shock move.

“The talk inside Aunty is the task of having to juggle the hosting of a national show with her duties as a single mother of two – particularly during nearly five months of homeschooling in NSW in 2021 – couldn’t be underestimated as a contributing factor towards (the) announcement,” writes Nick Tabakoff.

“Notably, Sales took off about six weeks of leave in the middle of last year – primarily, we hear, to allow her to dedicate herself to homeschooling her two boys.”