The ‘besties’ behind the Kyle and Jackie O reckoning

If there’s one thing the implosion of his radio show has made clear, it’s that no one can really stop Kyle Sandilands saying something once he’s on air. Except, sometimes, Bruno Bouchet.

On July 2 last year, Sandilands walked out of The Kyle and Jackie O show after Bouchet, the program’s 40-year-old director, ordered one of its censors to dump a segment. Sandilands had travelled close to the sun discussing then-alleged mushroom killer Erin Patterson before and Bouchet feared he was veering close to contempt again as the broadcaster took aim at speech restrictions. His explanation that he didn’t want Sandilands or Jackie “O” Henderson jailed did nothing to stop the reaction that followed.

“Until this show runs the way I intend it to be run, I will not be back on the air, at all … So well done censor,” Sandilands vented before he walked out. “Well done Bruno, wherever you’re hiding in my house. It’s going to take me a good two hours to find this prick.”

Bouchet may not literally cohabit with Sandilands, despite being at his house that day, but their lives are intertwined in almost every other way. Bouchet is not just the show’s director, and occasional foil: he is also Sandilands’ manager, the boss of his private company, and co-author of his 2012 autobiography, Scandilands.

It is a similar case for Henderson’s manager Gemma O’Neill, 43, who is a confidant, friend, strategist and, until recently, podcast co-host to her client. When Henderson, according to her lawyers, couldn’t bear to be near her former co-host at a Federal Court hearing last month, O’Neill showed up to observe proceedings.

That the pair have different managers at all is testament to the gradual decline in their relationship. Once, both broadcasters were managed by Sandilands’ then-best friend Andrew Hawkins. Adding to the dynamic of a family torn asunder, for a time O’Neill was Bouchet’s boss when she was running The Kyle & Jackie O Show and he was a staffer on the program. Now the managers find themselves on opposite sides of a three-way, $170 million legal dispute with the show’s former broadcaster ARN as their clients fight to get their lucrative contracts reinstated or effectively paid out.

Power beside the throne

O’Neill and Bouchet have taken different routes to court in support of their clients. O’Neill is expected to feature as a key witness but has been otherwise standing quietly behind her client. Bouchet, on the other hand, has been pictured filming Sandilands as he courts controversy, holding impromptu press conferences and arriving at hearings in his Rolls-Royce.

Despite their differences, their client-manager relationships are like no other. “In both cases, Kyle and Jackie hired their ‘best friends’, which is highly unusual,” says one leading talent agent, who spoke anonymously due to their ongoing role in the industry.

Both O’Neill and Bouchet are not run-of-the-mill managers, either. Each has a client list that contains just one individual. “Baby sitting and hand holding” is how the agent describes their responsibilities. By contrast, top talent managers at a-grade agencies like CMC, Token and Profile often have several clients at once.

Choosing a manager can make or break even the biggest entertainer. There’s a reason Colonel Tom Parker is portrayed as the villain in Elvis, controlling the King’s life decisions. Brian Epstein, known as the “fifth Beatle” took the band from leather rockers to global domination. These kinds of relationships are usually reserved for global music superstars though, not radio hosts in Australia.

Over the past 18 months, industry insiders say that both managers had sought to exert more influence on the direction of the show. Henderson pushed more spiritual and wellbeing content, increasingly in line with her external business ventures with her manager, O’Neill. Sandilands talked more politics, shifting the show in a different direction. All the while, the show was bombing in the Melbourne market crucial to the broadcasters’ combined $200 million in contracts, and Bouchet, most days, was physically in the studio.

Bouchet says that as a boss, Sandilands expects a hard work ethic from his staff. With that comes loyalty, and rewards in the form of lavish overseas trips to places like the south of France, Las Vegas or Beverly Hills.

Asked about how he copes with being berated by his boss, Bouchet says that “despite what people might think, Kyle is surprisingly open to other people’s ideas.

“Sure, he’ll push back hard, but if you’re right, he’ll back you just as hard.

“Having a boss who’s also your best friend is pretty rare – and it’s a big part of why I’m still here and why he still puts up with me.”

Of course, there are other reasons for Bouchet to stick around. Sandilands’ contract, revealed amid the hearings, ensured that while Bouchet is employed by him and his private company, he was also paid an annual $200,000 salary by ARN as the show’s director. On top of that, he’d earn a salary direct from Sandilands.

While there are few earnest comments from Sandilands on the record about Bouchet, in 2020 he told an industry podcast his manager was “doing well” in his new role running his private company, King Kyle.

“I look at him as the same slave as I have always seen him. He gets paid more now though,” Sandilands added.

O’Neill, meanwhile, declined to comment for this piece. The approach of both managers mirrors their clients’ attitudes to the now-two month long break-up of modern Australian radio’s most famous duo. Sandilands and his team have been on the front-foot, soaking up attention while Henderson and co have remained silent. Sandilands’ barrister said as much in court.

“This is not the opera singer who doesn’t want to sing. This is the broadcaster and performer who wants to get behind the microphone ASAP,” Sandilands’ barrister Scott Robertson, SC said last month.

Friends (almost) forever

The duo’s history with their respective clients date back some time. O’Neill was a teenager working at the reception desk of 2Day FM in Sydney when she met Henderson, then a host on the station, around the turn of the millennium. “Gemma was in school uniform when I met her,” Henderson told Studio 10.

Eight years younger than Henderson, O’Neill later became the executive producer of The Kyle & Jackie O Show in the early 2010s while still at Southern Cross Austereo, which formerly broadcast the program.

Bouchet is another former EP of the show and has been in Sandilands’ orbit for more than 15 years, first working on The Kyle & Jackie O Show in 2010, at a time when it was run by O’Neill. Initially, neither host appeared to like Bouchet, who was employed to book guests to appear on air. “I was probably trying too hard to be liked by Kyle and he despised me and I thought I would be gone after my second week,” Bouchet said on a podcast with Sandilands in 2020. Then later, he said, Henderson wouldn’t let him into the studio. “For a guest booker it was very difficult that I couldn’t take the guest into the studio. I opened the door for them and just pushed them in.”

But Bouchet persisted. Today, he is known for his friendly relationship with journalists and widely considered “well-liked” in the industry despite working in the high-pressure environment that is Kyle Sandilands. He is “team Kyle until the end” says another industry figure, speaking anonymously due to the ongoing legal case.

Besides the pay, there is another reason for Bouchet’s loyalty to Sandilands. Bouchet says he has had his “share of ups and downs” throughout his life while living with bipolar disorder. Sandilands, he says, has helped get him through those periods “without any shame or embarrassment”.

In one incident, he was sacked from the Kyle & Jackie O Show’s then-broadcaster 2Day FM in 2012 after a series of drunken tweets making light of a cinema mass shooting in Denver, Colorado. Bouchet took several years out of the industry to work as a sales representative for Casio. But he returned to the show in 2016, now on KIIS and ARN, with Sandilands’ support. Later, he was elevated to its EP in 2017. He quit at the end of 2018 to spend more time with his family and partner Laura Bouchet, who also a well-known radio producer and content boss at Triple M in Sydney.

But Bruno Bouchet wasn’t done with Sandilands. Sandilands and his long-time manager and best friend Andy Hawkins, who also previously managed Henderson and managed the pair’s defection to ARN in 2013, fell out in 2019. Bouchet replaced him. Bouchet was “too good to throw away” after leaving the show, Sandilands said at the time as he also made him managing director of King Kyle, Sandilands’ private company which oversees his various investments. The move was characteristic of the tight circle Sandilands keeps around him. His wife Tegan Kynaston is communications chief of King Kyle, his personal company, for instance, and was his personal assistant at the time they met.

Unlike Sandilands, Henderson has had a longer list of more traditional managers over the course of her career, including some big names. She dropped veteran radio executive and talent manager Brad March for O’Neill in 2022. March declined to comment. Before March, Henderson was represented by RGM Artists, a talent agency then co-owned by Hugh Marks, the ABC’s current managing director. Marks was even Henderson’s manager briefly before joining Nine, the owner of this masthead, as its chief executive in 2015. He also declined to comment.

The move to drop March took the industry by surprise, with Henderson instead opting for her best friend, O’Neill. The younger woman had been made redundant at Southern Cross, the radio company where she had been content boss of the Hit Network, home to stations 2Day FM and The Fox in Melbourne, in 2021.

After the redundancy, O’Neill founded her own talent management agency, Gemmie. Then she took a detour with an appointment as chief executive of corporate women’s network and events company Business Chicks in mid-2022. But just months after she joined, Business Chicks announced it was “scaling down” and making redundancies.

It was around that time that Henderson picked O’Neill as her representative. Speaking about her later decision to go into business with O’Neill, Henderson told Studio 10 that their friendship had deepened when her future manager was working on her show.

“She just went from a school kid wanting to get into radio to running a whole radio network all these years later, and Gemma also executive produced the Kyle & Jackie O Show at one stage in the past so we really got to know each other really well back then,” Henderson said.

Working with Henderson provided opportunities for O’Neill. In mid-2023, she and Henderson launched another business called ‘Besties’, primarily focused on speaking events, private holidays and “luxe products – all for you and your BFF”.

Then the duo launched their new podcast, Her Best Life, taking O’Neill from behind the scenes to in front of the microphone and camera. In public and private, O’Neill is intensely protective of her client.

Baptism of fire

That came to the fore in the first year O’Neill was managing Henderson, when she helped her address substance abuse issues. When the person supplying her with prescription medication cut her off, Henderson previously told her listeners, her first phone call was to O’Neill.

“I needed someone who I knew could a) help me, and b) wouldn’t judge me and was close to me that I could trust,” Henderson later told Mamamia.

O’Neill booked Henderson into a rehab facility in America and helped organise her temporary departure from the show, despite the difficulty of dealing with a client in the midst of a battle with addiction. “She really was like a child – screaming out for help but pushing you away,” O’Neill told this masthead’s Good Weekend magazine. “But there was also part of her that was giving in. I think she was exhausted.”

Sandilands, who at that time Henderson was still describing as the most important man in her life, was not told.

In more recent years, O’Neill has her own battles of a different kind. Her Gemmie talent agency went into voluntary liquidation last year after owing $543,548 to the Australian Tax Office. “I stand by my integrity, I stand by my work and I stand by how I’ve conducted myself in business over a very long career,” O’Neill later said on her podcast, adding she would not discuss details for legal reasons.

Then, just weeks before her final episode alongside Sandilands on February 20, Henderson announced on their podcast she was stepping back from the venture, needing to protect her private life. O’Neill would be carrying on alone, the pair said. This only lasted a few weeks. O’Neill paused the podcast in early April after announcing to listeners she had a miscarriage.

Despite the rollercoaster of events, Besties and Her Best Life went ahead with one of the brands’ highest profile events in April, a weekend retreat at the Coogee Intercontinental Hotel featuring headline guest Meghan Markle.

As Bouchet and Sandilands were manoeuvring to get the controversial broadcaster back on air, O’Neill was recording a video hyping the event for women eager to hear her, Markle and Henderson’s stories of resilience and success.

There could have been few clearer views of how far the camps have diverged. But they are likely to be forced together in a courtroom if their cases – Sandilands’ claiming his contract was improperly ripped up, Henderson’s arguing the network failed to protect her from his bullying – do not settle.

While Henderson wants her case heard separately from his, and Sandilands’ lawyers are agnostic, ARN’s lawyers told the Federal Court last month that there were so many overlapping factual issues the cases had to be heard together. Justice Angus Stewart is yet to decide if that will happen, but he has blocked out October 12 to October 23 for the trial. That could bring both managers even further into the limelight.

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