As news of Alan Jones’s arrest on Monday shocked , former 2GB employees have revealed how he was ‘held up as a god’ and regarded as ‘untouchable’.
Trevor* worked at the high-profile Sydney radio station as creative director, leading a team of copywriters who were responsible for writing the live and recorded commercials that were read by the on-air personalities including Jones.
Jones was the breakfast host between 2002 and 2020 with Trevor telling Daily Mail there was a ‘culture of fear’ with staff constantly ‘walking on eggshells’.
‘He was held up as a god, we were just the hired help, the lowest of the low. He was untouchable,’ he said.
‘If you had prime ministers shaking in their boots, the average person who worked with him could quite easily have been shown the door, based on Alan Jones going, “Well, they can’t work here anymore.”‘
Trevor revealed he was on the receiving end of vicious, ranting memos from Jones.
He said he was brought on as creative director because the person in the role at the time ‘didn’t have the grammatical expertise to cope with the pedant that is Alan Jones’.
Jones was a former school teacher at various schools in Brisbane and at The King’s School in Parramatta in Sydney’s west.
Trevor said he had a bizarre experience when he first started.
‘I introduced myself via memo to Alan, as I know he is a fan of the memo format, so I email him, and said, “Hello. My name is Trevor, and I’m your new creative director. If I can help you in any way with anything… etc, etc.”
‘And he responded with, “Could I write 10 dot points describing what I do as a creative director.”‘
Trevor said Jones had worked in radio for years already and knew exactly what the role entailed.
‘So I wrote out my 10 dot points, and I sent it to him,’ he said.
‘Then I get a memo back thanking me for my 10 dot points. And so I then had to send him back a memo thanking him for thanking me for writing my 10 dot points.’
Trevor said every morning he would receive ‘stream of consciousness’ memos about everything Jones believed was wrong ‘and how useless and hopeless the creative department is because they can’t get these basic things right’.
He said instead of attempting to solve any problem with a conversation or meeting, Jones would dictate these memos into a dictaphone and his secretary would have to type them up.
‘The memos would come fired out from the ivory tower of the West Wing,’ Trevor said.
‘He just went off the handle, and she was furiously typing, whatever it was going into this dictaphone.’
He said they were always an aggressive tirade of abuse and irrational as they were mostly about issues he had no control over.
He gave one example when Jones ranted about a live commercial script for Telstra and the fact he hated it contained the telecommunication company’s email address.
‘We can control grammatical mistakes, sure, but we can’t control Telstra’s email address,’ Trevor said.
He said Jones blasted his department for writing a commercial about a barista, ranting his audience ‘wouldn’t know what a barista was.’
He said Jones had just recently hosted the Barista of The Year award ceremony in a private capacity.
‘If he was concerned, surely he could explain what a barista was,’ Trevor said.
Another former creative department employee was also familiar with these abusive memos.
Barry* said the staff jokingly called them ‘Parrot Droppings’ in reference to Jones’s nickname of ‘The Parrot’.
‘We wanted to turn them into a coffee table book,’ he said.
‘Even though we joked about them, the level of vitriol was way off the charts.’
Trevor said Jones would try and motivate the staff, but was an outsider.
‘He would always be there doing the team bonding things at Christmas parties,’ he said.
‘He’d be doing the speeches, the rousing speeches that bring everybody together.
‘It was like he was doing a rugby pre-game, kind of a speech, which was great, but I don’t think he ever felt he was actually part of the team.’
Barry agreed it was a ‘real us and them mentality’ at 2GB.
The station at the time ‘wreaked of a toxic atmosphere,’ he said.
‘You never saw Jones… he never deemed you worthy enough to come down and have a conversation,’ Barry said.
‘He wouldn’t know my name.’
‘You occasionally saw Jones in the lift with his personal assistant cum driver, always a young man wearing a suit two sizes two big for him who would carry his briefcase.’
He never looked happy, we felt sorry for him.’
Barry said staff ‘lived in fear of being summoned to be ranted at in person’.
‘Every afternoon we would go through Jones’ live reads for the next morning meticulously, trying to second guess what Jones could even remotely, potentially have an issue with,’ he said.
‘It was just an insane level of paranoia… definitely not a healthy work environment.’
Daily Mail contacted Jones for comment.
*names have been changed