Jimmy Kimmel has broken his silence after being abruptly yanked off the air by ABC, telling longtime friend Adam Carolla that he’s living through “strange times” and even claiming he’s being followed by a helicopter.
Carolla revealed the texts on Thursday’s episode of The Adam Carolla Show, saying he reached out just hours after ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely over the host’s comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“I just sent him a text because you want to be on record as understanding or knowing or whatever,” Carolla said. “It just said, ‘Thinking about you. I hope you’re okay.’”
Carolla, who co-hosted The Man Show with Kimmel from 1999 to 2003, said he didn’t expect a response—but Kimmel fired back within 18 seconds.
“Wow, it’s strange times out here,” Kimmel wrote, according to Carolla. When Carolla joked that he’d finally booked Bill O’Reilly for Kimmel’s show, Kimmel responded: “I’m being followed by a helicopter.”
ABC has not said how long the suspension will last. The decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel from the air was made following direct threats from Trump’s FCC Chair, Brendan Carr.
He said the host’s comments wrongly linked Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, to the MAGA movement.
“The issue that arose here, where lots and lots of people were upset, was not a joke,” Carr said Thursday on CNBC.
Kimmel said that MAGA was trying to distance themselves from Robinson.
“We 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,” he said.
“In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving on Friday,” he went on, before playing a clip of Trump’s nonchalant response when a reporter asked how he was holding up after Kirk’s death.
Trump, undeterred by the backlash, spoke to reporters on Air Force One as he headed back to the U.S. from Britain and mused about revoking more broadcast licenses. “They give me only bad publicity [and] press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” he said.
Kimmel is reportedly “absolutely f-–king livid” as a result of the decision, sources and producers told the Daily Mail. “This is clearly the government overreaching. There’s no such thing as free speech in America, if the government can lean on companies to stop any content they don’t like,” one source told the paper.
“Jimmy is p----d over the decision to suspend him and the show and he isn’t going to take this lightly, as he is actively looking for ways to get out of his contract,” they said, with another insisting they’ve “never seen Kimmel this angry.”
