Despite the hairy optics surrounding Jimmy Kimmel’s six-day suspension from ABC in September, Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Dana Walden said that there was no contact between the Trump White House and studio leadership as they waited to “take the temperature down.”
“We hit pause to have conversations with Jimmy,” she said in a Thursday interview with Bloomberg TV’s “The Circuit.”
As entertainment executives face increased scrutiny for capitulating to Donald Trump, Kimmel’s temporary removal from the network on Sept. 17 was widely criticized as an encroachment on the late night host’s freedom of speech after he made a joke about “the MAGA gang” following youth organizer Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr encouraged ABC to take action against Kimmel, and local station owners Nexstar and Sinclair soon refused to air “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Trump gloated in the ensuing days that Kimmel had been fired.
But Walden reflected on that period in Thursday’s interview as an effort to diffuse an “extremely heated” situation, not act in accordance with the White House.
“We were thinking about only one thing as we made that decision very close to his show going back up on that Wednesday — and that was the situation was extremely heated, we wanted to take the temperature down, we didn’t think that was going to be possible that night,” Walden told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. “So we hit pause to have conversations with Jimmy. We wanted to resolve the situation in a certain way to protect our employees, to think about our audience.”
Pressing for more on what the conversations between Walden, Kimmel and Disney CEO Bob Iger looked like after the suspension, Chang asked if Trump had been in touch with Disney leadership: “Did you get any pressure from the White House?”
“He did not,” Walden said. “We did not hear from them.”
When the “indefinite” nature of Kimmel’s suspension caused bipartisan objection, supporters of the late night host called for boycotts of some of Disney’s most prized consumer offerings. As TheWrap previously reported, cancellations of Disney+ and Hulu doubled, with cancellations for Disney+ and Hulu totaling 3 million and 4.1 million, respectively, compared to the averages of 1.2 million and 1.9 million, respectively, in the designated three-month window.
“Well, I think those reports were highly exaggerated,” Walden said Thursday. “You saw the number of subscribers that we reported during our earnings, we had a very strong quarter. I think that this issue is firmly in our past.”
Watch Walden’s full Bloomberg interview in the video below.
