While Jackie O Henderson is staring down the prospect of heading to court with her ex radio co-host Kyle Sandilands, her ex husband Lee Henderson appears to have happily moved on, sparking engagement whispers after his girlfriend Gabriella Motta was spotted out and about wearing a huge sparkler.
The duo were enjoying a stroll through Sydney’s The Rocks at the weekend, when Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor Gabriella was seen wearing the gold ring, sparking speculation that the couple, who have been dating since 2018 could be headed down the aisle soon.
Despite their amicable split, the news will likely have come as a shock to Jackie, 51, who shares daughter Kitty, 15, with British photographer Lee.
Jackie and Lee were married from 2003 to 2018, and while they’ve managed to stay friends and successfully co-parent their daughter together, Jackie has been candid about some of the issues they faced during their marriage.
In her memoir The Whole Truth, she revealed that their relationship got off to a bad start when she lied about who she was, even pretending she could speak French to impress him.
“He didn’t catch me out in that white lie but I look back now and realise what a mistake that was, to be anything other than myself from the beginning. Those kinds of things, even on a small scale, set you up on a shaky foundation,” she said.
The radio star, who has been open about her struggles with substance abuse, says she should’ve seen the “tiny red flags” in their romance early on but that they both had trouble addressing the issues in their relationship.
“Lee was judgemental, for instance, in small but immediate ways,” Jackie wrote, using the example that Lee called her dream of buying a white BMW just like supermodel Elle Macpherson, “tacky” – leaving her to buy a car he approved of.
She also said her husband was at pains to point out when she gained weight, even shortly after she’d given birth to their daughter Kitty.
“My weight has always fluctuated a little. And whenever I added kilograms in my marriage, it was never tiptoed around, it was told,” she said.
“Sometimes he would wrap an arm around me and grab. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say as a joke, but I wondered if it really was. It was the worst possible hangup to target because weight had always been an issue for me.”
It lead to her confidence plummeting and had the knock on effect that it lead to intimacy issues between them.
“I caught him looking at me in the mirror with an expression of disdain or disgust. I’ll never forget that look,” she wrote.
Lee’s comments echoed those of her mother’s about Jackie’s weight when she was growing up – and ultimately she knew she didn’t want her daughter Kitty to grow up with the same hang-ups.
“Lee sometimes said things in front of Kitty that were derogatory about me, putting me down. And I said to him one day… ‘When Kitty is grown up one day… and her boyfriend speaks to her that way, would you be okay with that? I know you wouldn’t. And you can’t let her see that as the way she should be treated.’ But nothing really changed,” she wrote.
“He was an incredible father but we were no longer an incredible couple, and I couldn’t let her grow up thinking this was how a healthy relationship looks. It was too detrimental.”
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