Kyle Sandilands warns former ARN bosses he’ll fight decision after Kyle and Jackie O Show is officially cancelled

Kyle Sandilands has thrown down the gauntlet against former bosses ARN after the Kyle and Jackie O Show was officially cancelled this morning.

“I don’t accept it,” the controversial shock jock said in a statement. “My lawyers told them last week this would be invalid. And guess what? It is.”

Sandilands appeared determined to fight. He warned, “I’m not done. Not by a long way.”

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ARN, which owns KIIS FM, told the ASX this morning that it had terminated its contract with Sandilands and his company Quasar Media, “As a result, the Kyle and Jackie O Show will no longer be presented”.

ARN had two weeks earlier axed its contract with Jackie “Jackie O” Henderson. Sandilands’ and Henderson’s deals, signed in late 2023, were collectively worth $200 million over 10 years.

This current drama between Sandilands, Henderson and ARN kicked off on February 20 when Sandilands berated Henderson on-air for her interest in astrology as a reflection of what he claimed was her lax work ethic.

The bruising exchange between the two revealed a deep fracture in their relationship, and Henderson did not return to the program after that.

On March 3, ARN released an extraordinary statement to the ASX that it had terminated Henderson’s contract and given Sandilands 14 days to “remedy” a breach.

“Let me tell you what actually happened here,” Sandilands said today. “Jackie and I had a blue on air. That’s it. The kind of thing we’ve done a hundred times in 25 years. And ARN took the situation and decided to try and burn the place down.

“They sacked Jackie. They suspended me. They wouldn’t even let me pick up the phone to call her or anyone else on the show.

“Then — and this is the bit that gets me — once they’d made it impossible for the show to go on, they turn around and say, ‘You didn’t fix it. You’re fired’.”

Sandilands said during the two week period of his suspension, he had done “everything ARN asked”, and offered to go back on air, to work with Henderson or to work with someone else, and had been rebuffed.

“They didn’t want to fix this,” he continued. “They thought they saw a chance to get out of the contract they signed with me a year ago, and they ran with it.

“ARN knew exactly what they were getting when they signed my deal. They’ve worked with me for over a decade. They knew how I work, they knew the show, and they were happy to pay for it — because I delivered”.

It’s that last claim that has become the sore point in the relationship between Sandilands, Henderson and ARN.

When the radio duo renewed their contracts with ARN in 2023, they were the reigning king and queen of the Sydney market, and the amped up payday was to compensate them for a planned national expansion, starting with Melbourne, followed by Brisbane and the rest of the country.

While the two were well established and popular in Sydney, Melbourne was hostile to their well-known antics and brash and controversial style of broadcasting.

After a shaky launch in Melbourne at the start of 2024, the show never recovered despite attempts to tweak the level of offensive content. In the last ratings period, the Kyle and Jackie O Show was ranked eighth.

The previous KIIS FM Melbourne breakfast presenters, Jase Hawkins and Lauren Phillips, who had been shafted to make way for Sandilands and Henderson, have consistently outperformed the Sydney pair in radio ratings surveys.

Sandilands’ and Henderson’s failure in Melbourne put a pause on syndicating the show to other markets.

There was also the added pressure of a long-running activist campaign against the show which had targeted the network’s advertisers.