Megyn Kelly was a #MeToo profiteer, not a hero

By trying to minimize Jeffrey Epstein's predation, the former Fox News shows her true colors.

Megyn Kelly was never a #MeToo hero, but, for a brief moment there, she played one on TV.

And far too many of us fell for the act.

A decade ago, when she was the biggest star on Fox News, Kelly stood up to two of the most powerful men in conservative politics, Donald Trump and Roger Ailes, and was celebrated by Hollywood and the mainstream media as an unlikely feminist hero.

But whatever remained of that illusion came crashing down last week, when Kelly equivocated about Jeffrey Epstein’s serial sexual abuse of children.

On The Megyn Kelly Show, she argued that Epstein wasn’t technically a pedophile because he was actually “into the barely-legal type.”

“He liked 15-year-old girls,” she said. “I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds.”

Here are the actual facts: 15 is not “legal,” barely or otherwise, anywhere in the United States. According to prosecutors in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Epstein trafficked girls as young as 11 or 12.

Kelly’s remarks—which she subsequently doubled down on—were an obvious attempt to move the semantic goalposts and make Epstein seem slightly less awful than he quite clearly was. And it’s not hard to guess what motivated her: Once Donald Trump’s nemesis, she’s now a MAGA convert as passionate as Vice President JD Vance or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

It’s the latest incarnation in an opportunistic, shape-shifting media career that started in 2004, when Kelly began as a contributor at Fox News. She worked her way up the ranks, eventually hosting her own primetime show, The Kelly File.

She served up the rarest of red meat to the network’s audience, delivering rants about Santa being white and conducting softball interviews with abuse enablers Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Physically, she also epitomized the Fox News ideal: white, thin, blond, perpetually clad in brightly colored sheath dresses, heels, and more makeup than a drag queen. But she also had a toughness honed in her previous career as a litigator.

Among media observers, there was a growing perception that Kelly had the potential to be more than a mere Fox News clone. This notion came to fruition in 2015, when Kelly, moderating a Republican presidential debate, asked Trump about the misogynist way he had referred to women as “fat pigs,” “slobs,” and “disgusting animals.” Trump went completely berserk, and proved Kelly’s point by saying she had “blood coming out of her wherever,” implying not-so-subtly that she asked the question because she was menstruating.

In fact, Kelly was not caught up in some hormonal fit of pique, but was merely following orders from Rupert Murdoch to go hard on Trump (the mogul had not yet thrown his support behind the candidate).

Nevertheless, Kelly earned widespread praise for her handling of the controversy, triggering speculation that she would depart Fox News when her contract was up. She embarked on a staggeringly successful campaign to court the very “lamestream media” she had habitually denounced on the air at Fox News.

There was a Vanity Fair cover story, complete with glamorous portraits by Partrick Demarchelier. A week after the election, Kelly published a memoir with the girlboss-ish title Settle for More, in which she revealed that she received death threats as a result of her showdown with Trump and detailed the sexual harassment she was subjected to by Roger Ailes early in her tenure at Fox News.

The makeover worked: By the end of 2016, numerous networks were said to be interested in wooing her away from Fox News. The winner was NBC, which offered her a nearly $70 million package she couldn’t refuse. She was given a Sunday-night newsmagazine show, an hour of Today in the morning, and a role as a correspondent for breaking news and political coverage. The deal was brokered by NBC News chairman Andy Lack, the same guy who reportedly killed NBC’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein in order to protect Matt Lauer.

It was a big gamble to bring someone from Fox News into the theoretically non-partisan waters of a legacy broadcast network. And it quickly proved to be a bad bet. To make room for Kelly on Today, NBC had sidelined a popular host—and Black woman—Tamron Hall. Kelly was ill at ease in the chummy world of morning TV, and she mostly gained attention for the wrong reasons, like when she interrogated Jane Fonda about plastic surgery. Her Sunday night magazine, featuring interviews with newsmakers like Alex Jones and Vladimir Putin, flamed out after eight underwhelming episodes.

In October 2018, barely a year after the debut of Megyn Kelly Today, the host stepped in it once again: during a conversation about Halloween, Kelly seemingly questioned why it was wrong for white people to wear blackface. She apologized internally, but the damage was done. NBC, clearly eager to cut their losses, pulled her off Today and paid out the remainder of her contract, to the reported tune of $30 million.

The timing was especially unfortunate for the makers of Bombshell, a film about the women who brought an end to Ailes’ lascivious reign of terror at Fox News. Directed by Jay Roach, the film starred Oscar-winner Charlize Theron as Kelly and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson. It was one of two competing projects about Ailes in the works at the time: the other was the Showtime series The Loudest Voice, based on Gabe Sherman’s biography of the media tycoon. Kelly was not portrayed in the Showtime series because, as Sherman told The Hollywood Reporter, “Megyn Kelly was a peripheral participant in Ailes’ downfall…. Any dramatization that makes her a central character in Ailes’ takedown is pure fiction.”

By contrast, Bombshell made Kelly a main character in the drama and was narrated from her perspective. It largely glossed over Kelly’s history of racist commentary and also failed to consider the connection between the predatory culture at Fox News and the network’s political agenda. By the time it was released in 2019, Kelly was long gone from NBC, and her fleeting phase as a #MeToo “she-ro” was over. While promoting the film, Theron chose her words carefully, talking about Kelly with the “no judgment” tone actors tend to use when playing flawed fictional characters.

“Whether I have issues with her or not, she was part of something that will I think be a historical marker for women’s rights,” she said.

Theron and the other supposed Hollywood liberals behind Bombshell had fallen hard for the alluring fantasy of a conservative firebrand converted to the feminist cause. Bombshell tanked at the box office, but the film was compelling enough to members of the Academy that it received three Oscar nominations, including one for Theron.

Kelly could have lived comfortably for the rest of her life with the money she made flaming out at NBC. Instead, she returned to the right-wing grift, launching a company, Devil May Care Media, and striking out as— what else? — a podcaster. She hosts The Megyn Kelly Show on Sirius and YouTube and has developing a roster of other podcasts, including one anchored by alleged sexual harasser Mark Halperin.

In her latest incarnation as an “independent journalist,” Kelly has embraced the causes most beloved by anti-woke crusaders, especially the demonization of trans people. She has also converted fully to the MAGA cause. The day before the 2024 election, she endorsed Trump—the man whose supporters once terrorized her so incessantly she had to take armed security with her on a family vacation to Disney—calling him a “protector of women.” In July, she tapped former Trump whisperer Hope Hicks as her company’s chief operating officer.

It’s worth considering Kelly’s cynical trajectory right now, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene charts an eerily similar path. A fiery conservative blonde known for saying inflammatory things, Greene has lately won begrudging respect from liberals for her willingness to defy Trump and demand the release of the Epstein files.

Greene has presented herself as a champion of women and girls, but, given her loyalty to Trump, an adjudicated rapist credibly accused of sexual misconduct by roughly two dozen women, she is, at best, a highly selective one. Before we celebrate a noted antisemite and homophobe for exceeding the lowest of expectations, we should remember how that turned out with Kelly.

She made $70 million, Theron got an Oscar nomination, and the rest of us got duped.

Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture critic.

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