Speaking to Sunday Project colleague Hamish Macdonald, Wilkinson was asked if she “had a friendship” with Stefanovic, her on-air partner of a decade until she was dismissed by Nine in 2017.“Look, we’re not really in touch,” she said, prompting Macdonald to ask whether she’d “like to be.”Wilkinson paused and looked off-camera momentarily. “I’d rather we didn’t use this, if you don’t mind,” she warned. “I don’t want to look like I’m … you know. But I was hurt. I was hurt. But you pick up and you move on, and that’s exactly what I did.”Asked about the current state of her relationship with Stefanovic during an interview with Stellar published yesterday, Wilkinson struck a similar tone: “We don’t really have one. But I wish him well. Everyone has moved on.”Elsewhere in her Sunday Project interview, Wilkinson offered new insight into what was going on behind the scenes at Nine the day she dramatically exited the network without even a chance to say goodbye to the viewers who’d woken up to her for a decade.She revealed she got the call from her agent telling her Nine were dismissing her when she was standing in a supermarket, and felt “stupid, humiliated and betrayed. I think the idea was to humiliate me, because I’d been in negotiations to try and close the gender pay gap.”Asked just how big the pay gap was between her and Stefanovic, she said that it “doesn’t get much bigger than the gap I experienced.”The network’s chief executive officer, Hugh Marks, hit out at Wilkinson in The Daily Telegraph just days after her October 2017 dismissal, claiming that Wilkinson was offered a $1.8 million salary package, but wanted $2.3 million – pushing her well above Stefanovic’s annual salary of $2 million.“I went to an incredible amount of trouble to build that [$1.8 million] package for her. She wanted $2.3 million. It wasn’t a $200,000 shortfall to [Karl’s] $2 million magic number. It was $500,000,” Marks told the Telegraph at the time.Elsewhere in the Sunday Project sit-down, Wilkinson was asked what she thought of possible perceptions she was airing her grievances with Nine again now in a bid to “settle scores.”“I don’t settle scores. I set the record straight,” she said. Wilkinson is spilling the beans on her time at Nine as she hits the publicity trail for her upcoming memoir, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, out November 3. Lisa Wilkinson has vowed to leave “no stone unturned” in the autobiography, which runs to almost 500 pages and tracks her incredible rise through Australia’s media ranks, from being the youngest editor of Dolly magazine at just 21, to becoming the international editor-in-chief of Cleo, to her move into the TV world in the 90s and beyond.
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