The scathing email Lisa Wilkinson sent prior to being fired from the Today show
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In her new autobiography book It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This, Lisa Wilkinson shared the hostile email she sent before she was fired from Channel Nine’s Today show.
Lisa left Channel Nine's Today show back in October 2017 after a reported gender pay gap dispute. Photo from Channel 10.
With hopes of a discussion between her and former Today show boss, she waited for several hours outside Mark Calvert’s office, only to be disappointed by the no-show. He appeared to have left early to avoid her.
She later had to leave and head to a scheduled doctor's appointment.
“I don't know what compelled me but as I sat in the doctor's waiting room, I sent an email to Nick Fordham (Lisa’s manager) and Pete FitzSimons (her husband),” she said.
The furious email read: “Guys, I'm going to take a note of how the allocation of hosting roles goes down between Karl and me in the coming weeks. Never know when I may need it as a record...”
“This morning, I didn't have a single solo interview; and even the ones Karl and I would normally do together had been given to Karl alone. All I had was the 'girls chat' segment at 8:40. What is this, the 1960s?”
The email was sent just before the show host was fired from Today. Photo from Daily Mail.
Later on the same day, during her usual grocery run at Woolies, Lisa received a phone call from her manager Nick telling her she was ‘permanently off’ the Today show.
“The humiliation I felt at that moment was overwhelming,” the former show host said.
After her dismissal, Nine’s CEO Hugh Marks allegedly revealed that Wilkinson asked for a salary grade of $2.3 million, well above Stefanovic’s $2 million.
But Wilkinson publicly disputed the claims.
“I didn’t ask for salary parity, ever. I asked for a fairer share of the spoils that were coming to a show that Karl and I had taken to number one,” she went on to explain.
“I found out the salary Karl was on from two separate sources, and the gender pay gap was off the charts.”
“The $2.3 million is a complete lie and has been constantly repeated – it is a complete lie, and I have all the emails to prove it.”
She claimed that the statement about salary increase was fabricated to make her look bad.
“That whole narrative was put out there to make me look greedy, and like I’d risen above my station, but it was a narrative that I decided at the time not to get involved in,” she continued.
“Discussions like that are pretty unseemly, they’re pretty awful, and I’m the very first person to admit that when you do breakfast TV, you are paid a ridiculous salary.”
“But what was even more ridiculous was the size of the gender pay gap I had been experiencing for many, many years,” she finished.
Lisa left the Nine Network in 2017 when the company was 'unable to meet her expectations' after she demanded equal pay with co-host Karl.
In January of 2018, Lisa joined rival network Channel Ten's The Project for a rumoured multi-million-dollar pay deal.
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