Rehab was difficult for Jackie ‘O’ Henderson, but it never broke her. Even after months of therapy, baring her soul in 12-step meetings and tedious daily tasks, she managed to keep it together.
It wasn’t until weeks after leaving the $60,000-a-month Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, that her sadness and grief came to the surface.
And it happened while I was looking at WhatsApp.
During his stay in rehab, Henderson had formed a close friendship with a woman he called his “little sister.” The two were inseparable. He had even given Jackie a gift before he left.
The two promised to stay in touch, and did so at first. Then, messages from Henderson, 49, began to go unanswered. Their conversation became increasingly one-sided.
Every day, sometimes hourly, he would open WhatsApp, hoping to see that green dot appear next to the woman’s name in his list of recent conversations.
Radio presenter Jackie ‘O’ Henderson (pictured) has spoken of the deep sadness she felt after leaving rehab in 2022. Many of the friends she made at the Betty Ford Center subsequently relapsed.
It never showed up.
At first she didn’t want to believe it, but Henderson realized that her friend had most likely relapsed and was lost in the dark and dangerous world of addiction.
The KIIS FM presenter conducted a series of media interviews to promote the publication of her memoir The Whole Truth, but when I ask if she still keeps in touch with anyone from the clinic, the impeccably media-trained Henderson pauses. .
“No one has asked me this,” he tells me.
He then explains how several patients exchanged numbers and stayed in touch after leaving the facility, but almost all of them disappeared from the radar. Now there is only one who responds.
The rest, he assumes, are drinking and using again.
‘When they don’t respond, they stop responding, you know they’ve relapsed. One by one, you start to lose them all,” she says, fighting back tears.
“That’s the part that really bothers me,” he adds. ‘Because it’s not like they’re sharing that with you. They are very embarrassed, you know? Then they just stop talking to you… That’s the hard part for me.’
Shocking images showed Jackie O sitting on the shoulder of a parking lot in front of the Betty Ford Clinic in California while she smoked her last cigarette before being admitted.
Jackie shared the room she stayed in, where she held “distinctive” retreats. It took him two weeks to finally give up the sleeping pills, alcohol and painkillers he had been taking for years.
To this day, Henderson is still trying to contact her best friend.
“I’m really trying to get through to her and I just can’t… She was like my little sister there,” he says.
‘He bought me this hummingbird bracelet because he could see how much I loved hummingbirds. We don’t have them in Australia, they are all on the property and she bought me this bracelet. We really became like sisters there.
“She was very worried about her health and we stayed in touch. And I haven’t heard from her since. She hasn’t even been on WhatsApp.
‘It’s quite difficult to convince someone to seek help. They have to get there alone.
Henderson checked into the Betty Ford Center near Palm Springs to address her drug problem. and alcohol addiction in 2022.
Henderson dropped pounds drastically after leaving rehab, losing almost 20kg. It appears in the photo on the left in May 2022 and on the right in May of this year.
Although she mentions it briefly in her memoir, Jackie gives me a full rundown of her “packed” daily schedule within the clinic.
His day would start at 6 am. “You have to make your bed,” he says. ‘If you don’t, they’ll give you a frown sticker.
“I once forgot to do mine and was mortified.”
If patients receive more than three frown stickers, they are “punished in some way.”
Henderson does not elaborate on the punishment.
“I always woke up very early because I couldn’t sleep there for the first few weeks,” she adds, noting that withdrawal from Stilnox, the sleeping pills she was addicted to, kept her awake at night.
‘So I would get up and just kill time in the common room. There might be someone else there you’d talk to, and then you’d have to do your homework: kitchen cleaning chores or whatever.
Henderson (pictured in February 2024) has also undergone a complete style overhaul lately.
And then, you jump right into it. You go to a cafeteria, have breakfast, then go get the medications they give you for your day. That requires about an hour in line waiting to get it. Then you will go directly to a conference.
Henderson says each lecture was different: “There’s always something they’re trying to teach you, whether it’s that 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 inspiration”. Recovery story from someone who was once in rehab.
After that, Henderson and other recovering addicts would go to group therapy.
“Those exercises could be something like how you let someone down in your life because of your addiction, and you have to talk about that with the group,” he says.
After that, patients receive a private counseling session, before going to lunch and an hour of free time.
Henderson says most staff encourage patients to get an hour of exercise. I would do water aerobics.
Free time was followed by another group counseling session, lining up for more medication, then dinner, before returning to their dorms for an AA meeting.
“Then everyone sits down and watches a movie or solves a puzzle, and there’s always a fight over which movie to watch. So I usually go out and do a puzzle and stay out of fights, and then it’s time to sleep.’
Henderson adds of the therapy process: “It’s repetitive and can be exhausting because you’re constantly writing about your mistakes and what you’re learning, and then you have to share it.” It’s a lot, a full day and night. It’s not like you’re sitting around smoking cigarettes, chatting, you know? It’s not like that at all.’
It took him two weeks to overcome the withdrawal symptoms caused by the sleeping pills, alcohol and painkillers he had been numbing himself with for years. During this time, she says there were “There is no calm” in his body.
In her book, Jackie decided not to reveal the names of anyone she dated and opted to use pseudonyms. She previously dated toy Jack Tyerman (pictured together in May 2024).
“You can only imagine what that would do to your body when you stop taking that many sleeping pills: suddenly it doesn’t know how to fall asleep on its own,” he tells me.
‘The first five days I was able to sleep for an hour. Every day was just horrible. I would stay awake. I would stay there in bed all night.
When Henderson took a break from his top-rated Sydney breakfast show, Kyle and Jackie O, in 2022, his co-host Kyle Sandilands told listeners he was stepping away to “focus on his health” after contracting Covid-19.
She wanted the real reason to be kept a secret because she was embarrassed and afraid of how the public would judge her. Even when she felt ready to speak her truth two years later, she still needed the blessing of one very important person: her daughter Kitty.
When our conversation turns to Kitty, who 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 approached it has been non-judgmental, just compassionate and supportive,” Henderson says.
Speaking of judgement, in his memoirs Henderson has done something he often refuses to do on air: talk about his love life.
In one particularly revealing chapter, she recounts her experience dating a sex-addicted man. During their first date they spent two hours talking only about sex. Henderson ended the night sleeping with him.
She recalls, “I was so fascinated by it, before I realized, holy shit, I can’t just say to this guy, ‘Okay, it was nice meeting you.’ See you later, when I just talked to him about sex for two hours. He’ll think I’m the biggest tease in the world!’ Then they had a one night stand.
Looking back, Henderson admits that he didn’t I really want to have sex with him and now he regrets it..
‘I’m horrified by my lack of boundaries back then. I was more worried about what he would think of me than my own desires. To be honest, I’m a little horrified with myself.
In her book, Henderson chose not to reveal the names of anyone she dated, instead using pseudonyms to describe her recent experiences.
Still, several men recognized themselves in the pages of his memoirs. One of them was so pleased with his performance that he contacted Henderson through a friend..
“I heard about a guy I mentioned in the book, who’s the guy who spit in my mouth,” Henderson laughs.
“He contacted me indirectly (he actually talked to a friend of mine) and said, ‘Can you tell Jackie that I laughed so hard when I read that in the book?’ He had a really good sense of humor about it,” duck.
‘He said he supports spitting and all the girls he’s done it to since have loved it!’
If you insist…
Jackie ‘O’ Henderson’s The Whole Truth is now available in stores and online
Jackie O’s memoir, The Whole Truth, is now available