Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden said Thursday that the White House never reached out to Disney during its September suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Walden told Bloomberg’s “The Circuit” that during the several days Disney suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC show, nobody from the White House contacted the company, despite President Donald Trump’s public comments on Kimmel.
“We did not hear from them,” Walden told journalist Emily Chang.
Following pressure from local ABC-affiliate stations, Disney and ABC suspended Kimmel’s show for several days in September after backlash from Trump and conservatives over his on-air implication that the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk was a Trump supporter, even though authorities at the time said the suspect leaned left politically.
The suspension prompted backlash among liberals, many of whom argued that Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr pressured ABC to suspend Kimmel after he said during a conservative radio interview that there were potential “avenues” the FCC could pursue to hold ABC accountable.
During Kimmel’s time off-air, Trump weighed in on the suspension, telling reporters, “Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else, and he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.”
“They should have fired him a long time ago, so you know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent,” he added.
Walden denied that anyone from the administration contacted Disney at the time and offered more insight into why she and company executives decided to pull Kimmel from the air.
“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 gonna be possible that night — so we hit pause to have conversations with Jimmy.”
Walden added, “We wanted to resolve the situation in a certain way to protect our employees, to think about our audience.”
Chang followed up by asking Walden about reports that cancellations in Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions had surged, with some customers boycotting Disney and ABC over the suspension of the late-night host.
In one instance, XM radio host Howard Stern announced that he would be canceling his Disney+ subscription, stating, “Now, it might sound stupid, but the thing I did this morning — I’m canceling my Disney+. I’m trying to say with the pocketbook that I do not support what they’re doing with Jimmy.”
However, Walden remarked that reports of the cancellations were “highly exaggerated.”
“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,” she said.
Disney and the White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
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