Disney’s crumbling empire just hit another disaster, this time thanks to late-night clown Jimmy Kimmel.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney’s top brass, CEO Bob Iger and co-chair Dana Walden, made the decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the disgraced host refused to apologize for falsely pinning the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk on Trump supporters.
Instead of showing an ounce of humility, Kimmel doubled down and prepared a fiery, anti-MAGA tirade that executives feared would “fan the flames.”
ABC insiders revealed that affiliate owners and advertisers were in open revolt.
By Wednesday, 66 of the 200 affiliate stations had already threatened to black out Kimmel’s program, while corporate sponsors jammed the phone lines with demands for accountability. Nexstar and Sinclair, two of the largest affiliate groups, told Disney flat out: pull Kimmel, or we will.
His team reportedly prepped a “very hot monologue” targeting MAGA directly, not an apology.
Disney executives realized that letting him go on-air would ignite an even bigger firestorm, especially as FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr blasted Kimmel’s lies during a podcast appearance earlier in the week.
The Hollywood Reporter reported:
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).
The situation became a safety issue as Disney employees saw their emails doxxed, per the first source — some even received death threats. Disney wanted Kimmel to address the situation in a way that “would take down the temperature,” but what he had planned was “going to fan the flames with the MAGA fan base,” the source says.
A source at Jimmy Kimmel Live! counters to THR that Kimmel’s planned on-air address was not “making it worse,” but that he simply “wasn’t kowtowing” to the outrage.
Kimmel was “defending what he said [as] being grossly mischaracterized by a certain group of people,” the show source says.
Fox News host Jesse Watters delivered a blistering takedown of the scandal.
Watters:
“Little Jimmy Kimmel thought he was bigger than Disney—bigger than Mickey Mouse. Charlie Kirk’s body isn’t even buried, and ABC affiliates are refusing to air his show. They’re on the brink of an advertiser boycott, and this guy’s not even in first place.And he says, “Let’s go another round.” So the boss said, “Take a breather, Jimmy. You’re costing us a fortune and making us look like we don’t have a conscience.”
After the biggest assassination since Martin Luther King, the face of your network can’t lie about the shooting and pin it on MAGA. Sounds like an easy call to me. But the left thinks America, as a country, is finished. This is a major moment in American history.”
BREAKING: Jimmy Kimmel was planning on DOUBLING DOWN and ATTACKING MAGA (again) before he got SUSPENDED
ABC Executives told Kimmel to go on-air and APOLOGIZE… but instead, he had wrote a “VERY HOT” monologue, “taking aim at MAGA”
Disney said “We can’t have him go on… pic.twitter.com/FwEvxHuqF3
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) September 19, 2025
