How Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Went Down: Sponsor Panic, a Defiant Host and a Painful Call
Disney’s Bob Iger and Dana Walden wanted to know how Kimmel was going to address the situation. Sources say he planned to defend what he said rather than "kowtowing” to the outrage. Disney thought that would fan the flames.
September 18, 2025 1:31pm
On Wednesday, Disney caved to pressure from various partners and benched Jimmy Kimmel Live! Ultimately, the decision was Bob Iger’s and Dana Walden’s — but there was more leading up to it than previously reported.
On Monday’s episode of his long-running ABC late night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel mocked MAGA Republicans for scrambling to distance their own ideologies from those of Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson. In the days following Kirk’s murder, the left and the right were quick to point fingers at each other over Robinson’s perceived political leanings.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during the monologue.
The joke kicked off a “social-media shitstorm,” a source with information tells The Hollywood Reporter. It died down — temporarily.
But almost immediately after FCC chair Brendan Carr’s appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, the storm of shit “became a bigger swirl.”
Within hours, multiple ABC station owners held calls with senior Disney leadership expressing their concern with the comments, a second source tells THR.
Inside of ABC, “multiple conversations” with Kimmel were had at the “executive level,” the first person says, though the talks had not yet reached Bob Iger or TV head Dana Walden. The execs wanted to know: How was Kimmel going to address the situation on Wednesday night’s show?
The answer was not satisfactory to management, sources say. Meanwhile, the advertiser calls began to roll in and then the big affiliate conglomerates, Nexstar and Sinclair, threatened to preempt the show. The second source says that the blowback was snowballing enough that had ABC not acted, Kimmel’s show would have been dark in a large swath of the country, even beyond the Sinclair and Nexstar territories (including in the Washington, D.C., metro area).
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/how-jimmy-kimmel-benched-by-disney-dana-walden-1236374959/
