Rehab was tough for Jackie ‘O’ Henderson but it never broke her. Even after months of therapy, baring her soul in 12-step meetings and tedious daily chores, she managed to keep it together.
It wasn’t until weeks after she checked out of the $60,000-a-month Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, that her sadness and grief all came flooding out.
And it happened as she was looking at WhatsApp.
During her time in rehab, Henderson had formed a close friendship with a woman she called her ‘little sister’. The two were inseparable. She had even given Jackie a gift before she left.
The two vowed to stay in contact, and they did at first. Then, 49-year-old Henderson’s messages started to go unanswered. Their conversation became increasingly one-sided.
Every day, sometimes every hour, she would open WhatsApp hoping to see that green dot appear beside the woman’s name in her list of recent conversations.
Radio host Jackie ‘O’ Henderson (pictured) has spoken of the profound sadness she felt after leaving rehab in 2022. Many of the friends she made at the Betty Ford Center later relapsed
It never showed.
She didn’t want to believe it at first, but Henderson came to the realisation her friend had most likely relapsed and was lost in the dark, dangerous world of addiction.
The KIIS FM host did a blitz of media interviews to promote the release of her memoir The Whole Truth, but when I ask her if she still keeps in touch with anyone from the clinic, the impeccably media-trained Henderson pauses.
‘No one has asked me this,’ she tells me.
She then explains how several patients exchanged numbers and kept in touch after leaving the centre – but almost all of them have dropped off the radar. Now there is only one left who responds.
The rest, she assumes, are drinking and using again.
‘When they don’t respond – they stop responding – you know that they have relapsed. One by one, you start to lose them all,’ she says, fighting back tears.
‘That’s the part that makes me really upset,’ she adds. ‘Because it’s not like they’re sharing that with you. They’re too ashamed to, you know? So they just stop talking to you… That’s the hard part for me.’
Shocking images showed Jackie O sitting in the gutter of a car park outside the Betty Ford Clinic in California as she smoked her last cigarette before being admitted
Jackie shared the room she stayed in, where she went through ‘distinctive’ withdrawals. It took two weeks to finally wean off the sleeping pills, booze and painkillers she’d been on for years
To this day, Henderson is still trying to get in touch with her best friend.
‘I’m really trying to get a hold of [her] and I just can’t… She was like my little sister in there,’ she says.
‘She bought me this hummingbird bracelet because she could see how much I loved the hummingbirds. We don’t have them in Australia, and they’re all on the property, and she bought me this bracelet. We really became like sisters in there.
‘She was really touch and go with her health massively, and we kept in touch. And I just haven’t heard from her since. She hasn’t even been on WhatsApp at all.
‘It’s pretty hard to convince someone to get help. They have to get there on their own.’
Henderson checked into the Betty Ford Center near Palm Springs to address her drug and alcohol addiction in 2022.
Henderson dramatically shed the kilos after leaving rehab, losing almost 20kg. She is pictured left in May 2022, and right in May this year
While she briefly mentions it in her memoir, Jackie gives me a complete rundown of her ‘jam-packed’ daily schedule inside the clinic.
Her day would begin at 6am. ‘You have to make your bed,’ she says. ‘If you don’t, you get a frowned-face sticker put on it.
‘I forgot to make mine once and I was mortified.’
If patients get more than three frown-faced stickers, they are ‘punished in some way’.
Henderson doesn’t elaborate on the punishment.
‘I was always up really early because I just couldn’t sleep in there for the first couple of weeks,’ she adds, noting that withdrawals from Stilnox, the sleeping pills she was addicted to, would keep her up at night.
‘So I would get up and just kill time in the communal lounge. There might be someone else in there that you would talk to, and then you’d have to do your duties – kitchen cleaning duties or whatever it may be.
Henderson (pictured in February 2024) has also undergone a complete style overhaul lately
‘And then, you’re straight into it. You go to a cafeteria, you have breakfast, then you go and get medication that they put you on for your day. That takes, like, an hour of lining up waiting to get it. Then you’re straight off to a lecture.’
Henderson says every lecture was different: ‘There’s always something that they’re trying to teach you, whether it’s how addiction is a disease and not just a lack of willpower, or maybe it’s the importance of exercise and meditation, or maybe it’s the inspiring recovery story of somebody who was once in rehab.’
After that, Henderson and other recovering addicts would head to group counselling.
‘Those exercises might be something like how you’ve let someone down in your life due to your addiction, and you have to talk about that to the group,’ she says.
After that, patients receive a private counselling session, before heading to lunch and an hour of free time.
Henderson says most of the staff encourage patients to do an hour of exercise. She would do water aerobics.
Free time was followed by another group counselling session, lining up for more medication, then dinner, before returning to their dorms for an AA meeting.
‘Then everyone sits and watches a movie or does a jigsaw puzzle, and there’s always a fight over what movie is going to be watched. So I would usually take myself off and do a jigsaw puzzle and stay out of the fighting, and then it’s bedtime.’
Henderson adds of the therapy process: ‘It’s repetitive, and it can be exhausting because you’re constantly writing about your mistakes and what you’re learning, and then you’re having to share that. It’s a lot, a full day and night. It’s not like you’re just sitting around smoking cigarettes, chatting, you know? It’s not like that at all.’
It took her two weeks to get over the withdrawals from the sleeping pills, alcohol and painkillers she’d been numbing herself with for years. During this time, she says there was ‘no calmness’ in her body.
In her book, Jackie decided not to reveal the names of anyone she dated, opting instead to use pseudonyms. She previously dated toy boy Jack Tyerman (pictured together in May 2024)
‘You can only imagine what that would do to your body when you stop taking that amount of sleeping pills – suddenly it doesn’t know how to get to sleep on its own,’ she tells me.
‘The first five days I was able to sleep for an hour. Every day was just awful. I would lie awake. I’d just lie there in bed all night.’
When Henderson took a break from her top-rating Sydney breakfast show, Kyle and Jackie O, in 2022, her co-host Kyle Sandilands told listeners she was stepping away to ‘focus on her health’ after contracting Covid-19.
She wanted the real reason kept secret because she was ashamed and feared how the public would judge her. Even when she felt ready to tell her truth two years later, she still needed the blessing of one very important person: her daughter Kitty.
When our conversation turns to Kitty, whom she shares with her ex-husband Lee Henderson, the radio star’s face lights up.
‘I couldn’t be more proud of my daughter, the way she has been about it has been zero judgement, just compassionate and support,’ Henderson says.
Speaking of judgement, in her memoir Henderson has done something she often refuses to do on air: discuss her dating life.
In a particularly eye-opening chapter, she recounts her experiencing dating a man who was addicted to sex. During their first date they spent two hours talking about nothing but sex. Henderson ended the night by sleeping with him.
She recalls, ‘I was so fascinated by it, before realising, holy s**t, I can’t just say to this guy, “Okay, well, it was nice meeting you. See you later,” when I’ve just spoken to him about sex for two hours. He’s gonna think I’m the world’s biggest tease!’ So they had a one-night stand.
Looking back, Henderson admits she didn’t truly want to have sex with him, and now regrets it.
‘I’m horrified at my lack of boundaries back then. I was more concerned about what he would think of me than about my own wants. I’m kind of horrified at myself, to be honest.’
In her book, Henderson opted not to reveal the names of anyone she dated, instead using pseudonyms to describe her recent experiences.
Still, several men recognised themselves in the pages of her memoir. One of them was so pleased with his portrayal he reached out to Henderson via a friend.
‘I did hear from one guy that I mentioned in the book, which is the guy that spat in my mouth,’ Henderson laughs.
‘He contacted me indirectly – he actually spoke to a friend of mine – and said, “Can you let Jackie know I got a good laugh out of reading that in the book?” He had a really good sense of humour about it,’ she adds.
‘He said that he stands by the spitting and that every girl he’s done it on since has loved it!’
If he insists…
The Whole Truth by Jackie ‘O’ Henderson is available in stores and online now
Jackie O’s memoir The Whole Truth is available now
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