Jimmy Kimmel was in the bathroom when he lost the vote.
Kimmel would later recount what happened that afternoon in remarkable detail during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
It was around 3 p.m. on September 17, 2025, at the El Capitan Entertainment Centre in Hollywood. Kimmel was scheduled to tape that night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! at 4:30, and he was in his office doing what he always does that hour—typing away at the monologue—when the phone rang. It was ABC. They wanted to talk—which, he later said, was itself unusual.
He took the call in the bathroom for privacy. The executives on the line told him they wanted to “take the temperature down,” that they were worried about what he might say that night, and that the safest route was to pull the show off the air. Kimmel said he didn’t think that was a good idea. They said they thought it was. Then, by his account, a vote was taken, and he lost it.
“So I put my pants back on,” he told Stephen Colbert, “and I walked out to my office.”
He then called in his executive producers—including his wife and co-head writer Molly McNearney—and told them the show was being pulled. McNearney later told him he’d gone “whiter than Jim Gaffigan.”
To understand how it got to that point, rewind a week.
September 10–16: The Monologues
The backdrop was grim. CBS had canceled Colbert’s Late Show two months earlier, and Trump had publicly mused that Kimmel would be next.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10 at Utah Valley University. That night, no late-night host addressed it on air. Kimmel’s first extended remarks came the following night—he called Kirk’s killing senseless and said he’d never understand anyone cheering it.
The monologue line that detonated came four nights later, on Monday, September 15. Kimmel said the country had “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.”
At the time, investigators had not publicly established suspect Tyler Robinson’s politics or motive. The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd would later argue the remark’s “clunky wording” did more damage than its actual meaning—that it read, to many, as a claim Kimmel hadn’t quite made.
On September 16, Kimmel reiterated his broader point, taking aim at JD Vance and Eric Trump for politicizing the killing.
September 17: the easy way or the hard way
By Wednesday the 17th, Kimmel’s Monday night “MAGA gang” comment had become a right-wing media storyline, with many inaccurately suggesting that Kimmel had made light of Kirk’s murder and/or his murderer.
That morning, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on conservative host Benny Johnson’s podcast and called Kimmel’s conduct “some of the sickest” possible. Then came the sentence that hung over everything after: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel—or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Hours later, Nexstar—which operates 28 ABC affiliates and was awaiting FCC sign-off on its $6.2 billion Tegna acquisition at the time—said it would pull the show, calling the remarks “offensive and insensitive.” Sinclair, with 38 ABC affiliates, followed, demanding Kimmel apologize to Kirk’s family and donate to Turning Point USA.
Then came the 3 p.m. call, and the vote. The decision, it was later reported, was made at the top: by Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden.
The taping fell apart in real time. The audience was released. On the drive home, Kimmel counted 20 paparazzi cars and two helicopters.
ABC filled Kimmel’s 11:35 slot with Celebrity Family Feud reruns.
Kimmel would later describe the stretch that followed as “like a DUI in L.A.—three days in jail where I couldn’t say anything. I just had to sit quiet and make a lot of phone calls and take a lot of phone calls.”
He heard, he said, from “literally everyone I have ever met.” One of them was David Letterman. He spoke with Stephen Colbert, too.
Privately, Kimmel thought it was finished. After Sinclair issued its list of demands, he says he told his wife: “That’s it. It’s over.”
The reaction outside his house was the opposite of quiet. SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, and other unions condemned the suspension within hours; more than 300 members picketed Disney’s Burbank lot. An ACLU open letter drew signatures from over 400 entertainers. Disney+ and Hulu cancellation pages crashed as churn spiked.
Notably, outcry wasn’t confined to the left. Ted Cruz likened Carr’s threat to a scene from Goodfellas. Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan all objected to the government’s role, whatever they thought of Kimmel.
The one formal channel for public anger pointed the same way. Viewers filed nearly 1,600 complaints with the FCC over the saga—and when the file was later released under the Freedom of Information Act, it showed the anger trained on the regulator, not the comedian. A LateNighter review of the complaints found 62 percent primarily faulted Carr or the commission; fewer than 5 percent primarily faulted Kimmel.
September 22: ‘I ruined Dana’s weekend’
The resolution came together over a weekend of nonstop phone calls. Kimmel later characterized his conversations with Iger and Walden as genuinely good ones between people who’d known each other a long time and all wanted it to work. “I ruined Dana’s weekend,” he said. “It was just nonstop phone calls all weekend.”
Talks concluded the morning of September 22, and Disney announced the show would return the next night. On the central question—whether Kimmel would return muzzled—a source told Deadline: “Jimmy will say what Jimmy wants to say.” Kimmel had refused to apologize; what he’d agreed to do was clarify.
The affiliates weren’t placated. Both Sinclair and Nexstar said they would keep preempting the show, meaning Kimmel’s return would go dark on roughly a quarter of ABC’s footprint.
September 23: ‘Well, I do tonight!’
Kimmel opened his return the way Jack Paar opened his in 1960, after walking off The Tonight Show over his censored “water closet” joke: “As I was saying before I was interrupted…”
He wrote the 17-minute monologue that followed on his own, explaining later that it “had to come from inside me.” His voice broke more than once. He said he’d never intended to make light of Kirk’s murder or to pin it on any group. He praised Kirk’s widow, Erika, for forgiving her husband’s killer, calling it an example to follow. He called Carr’s threat un-American and dangerous. And when a clip rolled of Trump claiming Kimmel had no ratings, he had his answer ready: “Well, I do tonight!”
He did, in fact, have the ratings. The episode drew 8.6 million viewers—the most-watched regular installment in the show’s history—even though roughly a quarter of ABC’s affiliates didn’t air it at all. The monologue notched roughly 26 million views across platforms within a day, a Kimmel record.
Postscript
Within days, Sinclair and Nexstar both resumed carrying the show. The pressure had run the other way. At Bloomberg’s Screentime conference on October 9, Kimmel said he hoped the episode had drawn “a really, really bold red line as Americans about what we will and will not accept.”
And in December, ABC renewed Jimmy Kimmel Live! through May 2027. “I am pleased to announce another no-talent year!” Kimmel wrote, referencing a favorite Trump insult.
Then, in the spring, it happened again—with a different ending.
On his April 23 show, two days before Trump was due to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as its guest of honor, Kimmel delivered the comedy set the dinner wasn’t going to get. Its organizers had broken with tradition and booked a mentalist instead of a comedian—so Kimmel staged his own comic roast. Of the first lady, he joked that Melania had “a glow like an expectant widow.”
Two days later, an armed man tried to enter the dinner at the Washington Hilton; Trump, Melania and other officials were evacuated, and he was subdued.
The joke had aired before the attack, not after it. That sequence did little to cool the response. On April 27, Melania called the line “hateful and violent” and urged ABC to act; hours later Trump demanded Disney and ABC fire Kimmel “immediately,” calling it a “despicable call to violence.” Kimmel didn’t give ground. It was a light roast about the couple’s age difference, he told his audience—“not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination. And they know that.”
This time, no one folded. ABC didn’t suspend him; affiliates didn’t preempt him.
Disney went the other way—on offense. When the FCC, the day after Trump’s post, ordered ABC’s eight owned-and-operated stations into an early license review—a demand the agency hadn’t made of any broadcaster in more than fifty years—Disney and ABC accused it of “a retaliatory campaign” against protected speech, noting the administration had “openly and repeatedly” called for the network to lose its licenses over content it disliked.
If the administration’s goal was to shut Kimmel down, it seems to have only done the opposite. His viewership and influence are up, and Kimmel himself—who’s historically signaled ambivalence about continuing to host—seems more committed to continuing than he has been in the past, telling Dax Shepard last month, “this show is an outlet for people who are outraged by what’s going on, and I feel some responsibility to those people… So it’s not just like, ‘Man, why do I need to get up in the…’ It’s like, well, yeah, there is kind of a reason, a non-financial reason that you need to do this.”
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
