Rebecca Gibney Reveals How Richard Wilkins “Broke My Heart” — and the Small Detail She Never Forgot
Rebecca Gibney and Richard Wilkins have both spent decades as familiar faces in Australian entertainment. But long before their careers took them down very different paths, the pair shared a romance that Rebecca would remember for years.
When she eventually opened up about how it ended, one sentence summed up the experience simply: “Richard Wilkins broke my heart.”
And behind those words was a surprisingly personal story involving two cities, a single rose — and a small detail Richard apparently failed to notice.
Rebecca Gibney and Richard Wilkins once shared a romance
Rebecca first publicly revealed her past relationship with Richard in 2011, but it was during a 2015 appearance on Nova’s Fitzy and Wippa that she shared more about what had happened between them.
Rebecca said she had been 22 when the pair were together, with Richard around 32 at the time.
“I was madly in love with him,” she recalled during the radio interview.
“I thought we had a future together… until that fateful day.”
Despite the painful subject, Rebecca was able to laugh while telling the story many years later.
Distance was already part of their relationship
At the time, the couple were living in different cities.
Rebecca was based in Melbourne, while Richard was living in Sydney.
“We were together and I was living in Melbourne and he was in Sydney and we had been together a while,” Rebecca explained.
Before one of Richard’s flights, Rebecca gave him a rose — a small gesture intended to let him know she was thinking about him while they were apart.
It seemed simple enough.
What happened to that rose, however, would become the detail Rebecca remembered long after their relationship had ended.
The rose ended up with someone else
According to Rebecca, Richard took the flower with him on the plane.
But rather than keeping it, she said he gave the rose to a flight attendant with whom he was having a relationship.
“He gave the rose to the flight attendant who he was having a fling with,” Rebecca recalled.
She added that Richard later married the woman.
Rebecca was able to joke about the situation when recounting it years later, saying: “May the best woman win.”
But there was another detail attached to the rose.
And Richard, according to Rebecca, apparently hadn’t noticed it.
One small detail changed everything
Rebecca had attached a card to the flower.
On it were personal words intended for Richard, including the message: “I miss you.”
“He didn’t realise there was a card,” Rebecca explained during the 2015 interview.
The flight attendant subsequently found it.
It was an unusually intimate detail in a story Rebecca had largely kept private for years — and one that helped explain why the end of the relationship had affected her so deeply.
‘He did break my heart’
Looking back, Rebecca admitted the aftermath had not initially been easy.
“It was a bit messy for a little while because he did break my heart a little bit,” she said.
By the time she told the story publicly, however, decades had passed.
The hurt she described belonged to a much earlier chapter of her life, and Rebecca made it clear there was no continuing bitterness between them.
Where Rebecca and Richard stand now
Rebecca said she and Richard had eventually moved beyond what happened.
“No, we’re mates now,” she said when asked whether encounters between the two could still be awkward.
She also described Richard warmly, saying she had “no hard feelings at all” and believed he had “a good heart”.
Richard later addressed the old relationship himself, telling Fitzy and Wippa that the events were from “a long, long, long time ago” and referring to the “error of my ways”.
For Rebecca, the story has become something she can now look back on with humour.
But the image at the centre of it remains strikingly simple: a rose given to someone she loved, a card he apparently never noticed — and a chapter she would only explain publicly many years later.
Source: Rebecca Gibney’s 2015 interview with Nova’s Fitzy and Wippa, as reported by Now To Love.