Do we like Lisa Wilkinson?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of public support for women and a long list of charity roles, with one apologised private remark about a senator and a court-criticised speech.
Wilkinson’s start is pure Aussie underdog. At 19 she answered a classified ad for a secretary at Dolly magazine, and has said it’s the only job she ever applied for. About three years later she was editor-in-chief, the youngest in the magazine’s history, with no uni degree.
From there it was breakfast telly. She co-hosted Today with Karl Stefanovic from 2007 to 2017, then moved to Network 10’s The Project, where she stayed until late 2022. She walked out of that job saying the previous six months had been marked by “relentless, targeted toxicity”.
The stoush that defines her recent years began with her 2021 Project interview with Brittany Higgins. At the 2022 Logies she made a speech that ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum said blurred the line between an allegation and a finding of guilt, and Bruce Lehrmann’s trial was pushed back to October. Wilkinson later told the Federal Court she begged Ten to say publicly that it had cleared the speech, and felt “trashed” and blamed.
Lehrmann then sued her and Ten for defamation and lost in April 2024. The Full Court dismissed his appeal in December 2025, finding the judge hadn’t erred and that the rape allegation was made out on the balance of probabilities. Lehrmann denies the allegation. Ten also agreed to cover part of Wilkinson’s legal bill, about $558,000 of the $1.8 million she claimed.
On the harm test, nothing turned up from her on LGBTQ+ or trans people, migrants, vaccines or climate, and that’s honestly a thin record rather than a thick one. Her public cause is women. The one blemish is a leaked private recording in which she questioned whether Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s preselection was valid and struggled with her name. The No campaign used it for fundraising, and Wilkinson and Ten apologised, with her saying the chat was private and out of context.
The latest chapter is calmer. The Titanic Story of Evelyn, out in April 2026, tells the story of Evelyn Marsden, the only Australian-born survivor, and she says she wrote it because the tale had always been told through a male lens. In July she reposted a comedy clip after Stefanovic’s Today exit, joking that she was the one fired for going on about women’s issues.