Kyle Sandilands Has Been Sacked And His Show Cancelled

Notorious shock-jock Kyle Sandilands has had his 10 year contract worth $100 million terminated by employers ARN Media. Aww.

ARN Media said in a statement on Wednesday it had issued a notice of termination of contract to Sandilands and his company Quasar Media, thanks to a dispute that began with an on-air argument last month between Sandilands and his co-host Jackie ‘O’ Henderson.

“As a result, the Kyle and Jackie O show will no longer be presented,” the statement sent to the ASX said.

Two weeks ago, ARN  provided written notice to Sandilands “stating that it considered Mr Sandilands’ behaviour during the broadcast of 20 February 2026 to constitute serious misconduct and a breach of ARN’s services agreement with Quasar Media, under which Mr Sandilands presents the Kyle and Jackie O show. Sandilands was given 14 days to remedy the breach.

In a statement, Kyle Sandilands has said that he doesn’t “accept” the termination.

“My lawyers told them last week this would be invalid. And guess what? It is.”

The move comes after an argument on February 20, where Sandilands accused Henderson of being “off with the fairies”, and criticised her interest in astrology, claiming they made her “almost unworkable”, and claimed her fixation on astrology charts made her sound like a “drug addict”. This all happened while the pair was looking at the astrological birth chart of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

The seven-minute-long exchange was described as an “attack” by Henderson.

“Let me tell you what actually happened here,” Sandilands says in his statement. “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.”

The presenter says he was willing to work with ARN towards a resolution, but believes he was stonewalled at every opportunity since the incident.

“They weren’t interested. They didn’t want to fix this. 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.”

A 27 year partnership over

Kyle and Jackie O have been a radio duo for 27 years, moving to breakfast in 2005 and then to KIIS in 2014. They have been under contract in a lucrative $200 million, 10-year deal that was set to run until December 2034.

Their partnership has been defined by controversies, including the duo being taken off the air in 2009  when they were found to have breached guidelines during a lie-detector segment where Sandilands asked a teenager who had been raped about her sexual experience.  Last year, the Australian Communications and Media Authority threatened ARN with action to force the pair to rein in their “vulgar, sexually explicit and deeply offensive” content.

More recently they narrowly avoided prosecution over on-air comments made during the trial of triple-murderer Erin Patterson.

Sandilands in particular has a history of being called out for “homophobic” comments, such as disparaging comments about gay men and “sticky floors”, introducing their gay newsreader Brooklyn as a “massive homo” who “used to be a real gay whore”, and breaking radio decency standards by calling Mpox “a big gay disease”.