Do you remember Megyn Kelly? I once walked past her in a Chicago O’Hare bathroom in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had won his first presidential election, and was momentarily stopped in my tracks by both her nuclear-grade charisma and her pixie cut. For a woman to have short hair on Fox News, where Kelly was a star anchor at the time, seemed as seditious to the network’s established order as reading Judith Butler or Karl Marx live on air. But this was a moment during which Kelly seemed to be leaning into the role of crusader for women—speaking out about being sexually harassed by the former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and so inflaming Trump with her rigorous questioning during one debate that he later insinuated on CNN that she must have had her period.
All of which makes it so disconcerting, 10 years later, to see Kelly now, on her daily SiriusXM and YouTube show, cursing and sneering with long barrel curls and the gusto of someone hosting not a discussion of polling data but a Two Minutes Hate. “I’m just gonna be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal,” Kelly said on Monday, discussing the anonymous woman who has filed a lawsuit detailing her alleged gang rape at Cornell University. (The men named in the lawsuit have denied any wrongdoing.) “She’s extremely”—here Kelly screwed up her face in disgust—“beefy in, like, her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes. Admired, wanted—some women even foolishly say loved—by these guys at Cornell. This is probably a first for her. She’s probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one.”
[Sophie Gilbert: Is college getting less safe for women?]
We’ve seen some drastic heel turns in the media over the past few decades, but none quite as morally appalling as a former self-described advocate for female empowerment suggesting that a woman in this situation might have craved the attention because no one would have wanted to have sex with her otherwise. (Not to mention the contentions that the woman Kelly seems to be referring to, whose name has been leaked by some commentators, is not actually Jane Doe, based on her age and the fact that she would have been too young at the time to attend college.) Normally, I have a pretty strong constitution for this kind of bad-faith rage bait. But Kelly’s display this week of what I can describe only as performative hysteria has been hard to watch. Less than a minute into her show on Monday, she invoked the Salem witch trials. Twenty-three minutes in came her first pronounced use of the word fuck (I counted seven in total). That the whole performance was interspersed with ad reads for supplements and a tiny avatar of Kelly pointing giddily at the “Subscribe” button just added to the cognitive dissonance. It felt like watching morning television in Gilead.
I’ve been stuck all week on the question of how much of Kelly’s performance these days is attention-seeking behavior for the YouTube algorithm and how much is reflective of what she actually believes. Kelly, 55, grew up outside of Albany, where she also went to law school, becoming an editor at the Albany Law Review. She was an attorney for almost a decade, but has said that watching live newscasts on 9/11 inspired her to change careers and become a TV reporter. She was hired full-time at Fox News in 2004. Before long—according to her allegations—Ailes began making inappropriate comments, such as how sexy he imagined her bras must be. In January 2006, Kelly claimed, Ailes tried to kiss her; after his third attempt, she said she got up and walked out of his office. (Ailes denied Kelly’s allegations; he died in 2017.) Three months later, Kelly made a name for herself with her skeptical coverage of the Duke lacrosse team’s alleged gang rape of an erotic dancer. (The woman in question eventually admitted to fabricating the assault.)
All of this matters, I think, because it communicates to what extent Kelly’s apparent worldview—where she herself can face sexual harassment due to patriarchal power structures that protect and even reward abusive men, but other women are likely lying—has been shaped by her rise and fall on TV news. In 2016, she declined in an interview with NPR to call herself a feminist. (She dislikes the label, she said, as though it’s just a branding issue.) Her 2016 book, Settle for More, was published just a week after Trump won the presidential election, and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller. Reviews were lukewarm, perhaps because of the news environment: “For all the disgust that she claims to feel for the misogyny and male entitlement” that seemed to be ramping back up in the national culture, Isaac Chotiner wrote in Slate, “and for all the personal harm it caused her, our bleak future is one in which Megyn Kelly is likely to find herself right at home.”
But things took a downward turn when Kelly left the Fox fold. In 2017 she was poached by NBC News, which offered her an annual salary reported to be more than $20 million to host a daytime talk show, Megyn Kelly Today, and a Sunday-night news magazine, which was criticized for softball interviews with Vladimir Putin and Alex Jones and ultimately canceled. Megyn Kelly Today didn’t fare much better—Kelly, with her flinty self-possession, was criticized for being too chilly for daytime TV. During her first week, she awkwardly grilled Jane Fonda about whether she’d had plastic surgery while Fonda was promoting a movie next to her co-star Robert Redford. (“We really want to talk about that?” Fonda responded, after an agonizing few seconds of icy silence.) In October 2018, Megyn Kelly Today was canceled when Kelly defended blackface in a segment on Halloween costumes. Soon, she was dropped by her agency, CAA. A few months later, her NBC contract expired.
This moment seems to have influenced Kelly’s current persona. Public humiliation is hard for anyone to endure, but for someone with a renegade streak (“I’ve never been a ‘pc’ kind of person,” she reportedly wrote in her apology email to NBC staffers after her blackface comments), seeing so many people celebrating her failure must have been immensely painful. By the time The Megyn Kelly Show launched as a podcast in September 2020, mid-pandemic, Kelly was snidely describing her guests as lefties, complaining about the assault allegations against the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and raging at the “dishonesty” of the press covering Trump.
The pivot, whatever its reason, seems to have done what it was supposed to. Kelly has more than 4 million YouTube subscribers and The Megyn Kelly Show is one of the top podcasts in the country. Because Kelly is half-Italian and half-Irish, she told Semafor in 2024, “if you choose to watch the show, you will definitely glean something from the hand gestures and facial expressions that you might not pick up from listening alone.”
Having watched Kelly all week, I can attest to this. Although she injects real poison in her voice to rage against, say, the singer Olivia Rodrigo for expressing support for Cornell’s Jane Doe, she accompanies this with the shrugs and waves of a waiter trying to describe tonight’s special of veal parmigiana. “Olivia, in sum, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she said. “Shut up and stick to singing. I liked you better when you were in front of a microphone singing your weird little depressing songs. Shut UP. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You can sense she’s imagining clips being spliced for TikTok and Instagram, and tailoring her delivery to provoke maximum indignation. As a rant, it feels much too phony—and cynical, given how fury seems to be the sole emotion that can build an audience in 2026, and the fact that Rodrigo is one of the most popular women alive. (“The only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise,” Rebecca Jennings wrote earlier this year in New York magazine, “is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swaths of the public.”)
But in moments, Kelly does seem to slip out of character. Although she seems perfectly happy excoriating Jane Doe, Kelly draws the line at revealing her name. “I know her name,” she said on Monday. “It’s been well publicized online. But no one in the mainstream media has said it. And as you know I’m seriously considering just saying it. And the reason I haven’t is because I don’t want to do anything to hurt this young woman, to get her hurt, or to add to the pain I’m sure she’s feeling.” Her voice is surprisingly gentle. Her hands stay down in her lap. Could it be that this woman who herself had to hire armed guards for her family after being personally targeted by Trump actually feels for someone caught in a similar nightmare? Is all this spewed-out ire and provocation really just about a reward as soul-rotting as clicks and followers? I don’t think Megyn Kelly will ever tell us, but I have my suspicions.
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