Grant Denyer opens up about brutal argument with former Sunrise boss: "I nearly killed him"
Grant Denyer has opened up about a brutal altercation he had with a former Sunrise executive producer on the latest episode of his podcast with wife Cheryl, It’s All True.
The famous TV personality revealed he “nearly killed” Adam Boland during a heated physical argument that took place while Boland prepared to farewell Seven’s long-running breakfast show in 2010.
The program was to be broadcast live from Hawaii in an elaborate week-long salute to Boland.
Denyer recounted that it was something he “didn’t really want to do.”
He admitted that at the time both he and Boland were “admittedly not in the best form of our lives” as he was newly-married to wife Cheryl, who was also six months pregnant and working as a TV producer.
He said that Boland gave him an ultimatum if he wanted to bring Cheryl on the trip: “She has to pay for her own flights and she needs to work.”
Denyer claimed that while in Hawaii, Boland was “not hands on – he wanted to swan by the pool, have fun and bask in the glow of his success”.
Adam Boland made Sunrise a ratings hit in the early 2000's.
However, he explained that his pregnant wife was put to work scouting locations, producing Sunrise segments and “doing a lot of running around”.
A technical failure during one morning’s broadcast saw Cheryl cop Boland’s wrath.
“He turns on Cheryl and starts having a go at her. He says Cheryl is useless, incompetent … and he called you a b**ch,” Denyer recounted.
“He starts flat-out abusing us. Proper abuse. It wasn’t his finest hour, and it certainly wasn’t my finest hour.”
Denyer explained what happened as he went to the control room and confronted Boland.
“I blew up at him, told him to get f***ed. I said, ‘You will never talk to my wife like that. There is no way you’ll ever talk to my wife like that.’ I grabbed him and slammed him against the wall and held him by the throat, yelling at him for 10 minutes on,” Denyer revealed.
“I let him have it double barrels. I was going to rip his head off, I was so furious. Nobody intervened. I did the wrong thing but I needed to have my say and eventually it took three people to pull me off him!”
The TV personality said the incident was “not something I’m particularly proud of”.
“I am ashamed of my actions and I would do it differently now,” he said.
The star says he and his former boss have since patched things up. “We’re all good now,” he said.
“We’ve made up, we’ve spoken about it and we’re all good now.”
Cheryl said her husband’s actions were “heroic but scary”.
“You really snapped. In all the years that I’ve known you, I’ve never seen that happen,” she said.
Boland himself had previously discussed the fight in his 2014 memoir Brekky Central.
However, he said the stoush was a case of “crossed wires”, meaning Denyer mistakenly thought he had insulted Cheryl.
“I don’t think he sees it the same way I see it,” Denyer said during the podcast.