After Fox, Megyn Kelly Aims To Be a Force for Good

Megyn Kelly is excited about bonding with her fellow human beings. She’s so excited she’s bouncing in her chair, hands waving, as she talks about empowerment and laughter and tears. It’s a recent summer evening, and we’re in her living room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—a simple space of modern furniture, earth tones, and bookshelves (mostly hardcover novels, De­Mille to Franzen). The apartment is quiet, uncharacteristically so, as her husband, the tech CEO turned novelist Douglas Brunt, and their children—sons Yates and Thatcher, eight and four, and six-year-old daughter Yardley—are all at the beach. Kelly, barefoot in a loose cream-colored sweater and black leggings, is telling me about her new perch at NBC and the morning show, Megyn Kelly Today, that’s set to debut later this month. Not that she can get into specifics. Occupying what used to be the 9:00 a.m. hour of the Today show, her new venture, she says, will have a live studio audience and guests of various sorts. It will be “newsy,” she adds, without being a news show. Moreover, it will be a force for good; a spiritual net positive.

“My vision,” says Kelly, “is that at the end of the hour, people will think, Wow. I feel great. That was good for me. That was good for my soul.”

Let’s reflect on this for a moment. Kelly is the woman who spent more than a decade at Fox News refereeing shouting matches about the scourges of Obamacare. Her interviewing style, if it had to be captured in a single word, is probably most often described as “prosecutorial.” And now she wants America to sit down with her every morning for a third cup of coffee.

“There is so much more to my personality than I was able to express on cable news,” she says. “Yes, I can ask tough questions. Yes, I can handle myself when under attack. Yes, I don’t tolerate BS. But there is a spiritual component of who I am that went completely unutilized . . . and over time, I found that soul-killing. And no, it’s not that Fox News was soul-killing, as so many people want me to say. It’s just cable news, political infighting—that environment.”

Is the public ready to accept the spiritual side of Megyn Kelly? Media critics pounced as soon as her move to NBC was announced, suggesting that her hard edges wouldn’t fit the soft contours of network television, particularly morning television. And this summer’s Sunday newsmagazine program Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly achieved somewhat modest ratings (it is due to return in spring of 2018). Nevertheless, Kelly is formidably, perhaps constitutionally, confident; above all, she seems relieved—not to be relying on the talent she developed as a young corporate lawyer, then honed over twelve years at Fox.

“If you put anyone into the Colosseum, they’ll fight,” she explains, “or you get eaten by the lion. What are your choices?”

I suggest that some people might just curl into a ball, and she’s momentarily puzzled. It’s clear she never considered that possibility.

“Well, OK. You either surrender or fight. If you want to live, you fight.”

Kelly is five feet six in bare feet, but her taste in footwear means she typically moves through the world at an elevation of at least four inches above that, the delicacy of her bone structure offset by the sureness of her stride. One of the few personal items in her new office at NBC is a shoe rack with about a dozen pairs of heels. The day I visit she’s wearing a pale-pink sheath (I ask the name of the designer, and she has me unzip the back to peer at the label: Victoria Beckham. “Who knew?”), and by all appearances, a hair-and-makeup team has left her only moments ago. In fact, we will finish talking in a few hours, and then she’ll head down to NBC’s styling and wardrobe department. Just looking at her makes me sit up straight, and I wonder if she has the same effect on her staff and whether this is part of some brilliant subliminal strategy to keep people from slouching.

We are on the brink of the Alex Jones controversy—a week of hellfire aimed at Kelly for her decision to interview the radio host and conspiracy theorist on her Sunday Night program. One of Jones’s most rabid and reprehensible conspiracy theories, of course, is that the massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax. “I felt incredibly sad that I had done anything to upset those families,” she says when I ask her about the furor. “You could argue they are literally the most sympathetic group of people in the country—at least one of them. And that was in no way what I had wanted to do or had set out to do.”

But she also stands by the interview, a grilling of Jones that demonstrated how he has gained disturbing traction in recent years, not least with President Trump. Most established media observers agreed, after it aired, that Kelly did anywhere from a decent job to an outstanding job. And yet for all the dust it kicked up, the episode was little seen: Its ratings trailed well behind those of the show’s main competition, CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Such is the conundrum that surrounds Kelly, who I’ll come out and say I liked from the moment I met. It’s not just that we are exactly the same age and have different spellings of the same name. She has a coolness of temper and a kind of bright-eyed toughness—appealing qualities that have made her a television-news star. But it’s also true that unlike, say, Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, she has risen to this point in her career without a loyal constituency. The Fox News crowd recalls all too well her feisty willingness to veer outside the network’s ideological lane—most famously during the GOP-primary debate when she enraged candidate Trump by asking him about his vulgar characterizations of women. Meanwhile, progressives would accuse her of a good deal of race baiting, notably by ginning up the idea that the New Black Panther Party was a threat to America, or by insisting that Santa Claus was white.

Kelly’s efforts to remain apolitical in a politically inflamed environment like Fox may have served her well in some respects—being able to make the leap out of cable news at all is a privilege that would unlikely be afforded to Hannity or Maddow. But it’s hard not to feel that, for the moment at least, she is out there on her own. “Most television reporters really project their bias,” says Brunt, whom she met on a blind date in 2006 and married two years later. “Many are for the left, and the left loves them. Many are for the right, and the right loves them. Each of these has a base of support. Megyn is for neither. Therefore she has no base, really.”

“Being a star on one network doesn’t mean you’re going to be a star on another,” says Politico media columnist Jack Shafer. “Many of her followers on Fox probably aren’t even aware that she moved.”

For the record, Shafer was among those who praised Kelly’s interview with Jones, writing that “short of waterboarding him, I don’t know what more Kelly could have done to expose Jones’s dark methods.” He also admired her handling of Trump in the run-up to the election. “It revealed a part of Trump that he didn’t want people to see. It was great work. But early in her career and into the midpoint she was pretty much a pliant Fox News peddler of Roger Ailes’s favorite stories. So there’s a legacy of that. There are people who’ve made up their mind about her and might never come around even if she could break the next Watergate story.”

Still, it’s not entirely clear that Kelly even wants to break the next Watergate story. What she wants, she says, is to have honest conversations about topics that are increasingly difficult to be honest about. She describes her morning show as a sort of high-low mélange of pop culture, political analysis, and practical advice. On the more perfunctory side, the Kardashians will make an appearance—“The question I have been wanting to ask them for years is whether they are a force for good or evil,” Kelly says—but there will be no cooking segments, and not just because Kelly hates cooking.

“There’ll be shows where it’ll be a little racy,” she says. “And there’ll be shows that are very emotional. And there’ll be shows that are just information and helpful. I’m a very practical person, and so I’m hoping to offer these discussions in a very practical, meaningful way that’s time-efficient and—I don’t like the word fearless, because it sounds so self-promotional—but let’s just say doesn’t cower. Right? That doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects.”

Oprah Winfrey comes easily to mind here, as she is making her own return to television in the fall. “A lot of people have said, ‘Oh, she wants to be Oprah,’ ” Kelly tells me. “That’s not true. I love Oprah. And certainly there are elements of her show that I would love to incorporate. But just to go out there and try to be Oprah would be inauthentic as well. What I’m trying to do is create the show that I, and virtually every person I know, would like to see. Every woman in particular.”

The youngest of three, Kelly spent her adolescence and most of her childhood in an Albany suburb. Her father, a professor of education, died of a heart attack when Kelly was fifteen, a shattering event made worse by the fact that her last conversation with him had been an argument in which she stormed out, angry that he wouldn’t pay for the class ring she wanted.

“She never forgave herself for that,” says Kelly McCready, who has been Kelly’s close friend since childhood. “I remember she called me when it happened. She was sobbing so hard I couldn’t understand her. But even then, that resilience you see in her now was there. She just bucked up and got through it.”

McCready and Kelly spent a lot of time at Kelly’s house as it afforded certain freedoms—Kelly’s siblings were older, and her mother worked as a nurse before pursuing her Ph.D. in counseling. They watched Miami Vice, mooned over Jon Bon Jovi, and sprayed vast amounts of Aqua Net into their hair. (Or on junk food in order to keep from eating it, a habit Kelly still admits to. She says she hates to exercise, “so I spray hairspray on sweets, or sometimes I drown them in Palmolive” à la Miranda on Sex and the City.) A dutiful if unremarkable student, Kelly was a cheerleader and always in the popular crowd, with the exception of seventh grade, when she was suddenly ostracized. In Settle for More, Kelly’s 2016 memoir that does double duty as a kind of extended pep talk/how-to guide for girls who (should) want everything, Kelly draws heavily from the seventh-grade ordeal.

“It wasn’t so much the targeting in class, it was the total elimination of me as a person,” she writes. “No one would sit with me at lunch. No one would stand next to me in the gym. . . . No one would take my calls.”

At 46, Kelly is solidly Generation X, a cohort that may be the last to have grown up outside the force field of hovering parents. She puts great stock in being left to your own devices and fighting your own battles. Kelly muddled through the bullying, never letting her grades drop despite the searing misery of it all. The bullies eventually moved on to other targets, and by high school Kelly had blossomed and never looked back. Later, at Syracuse University, she studied political science, sat on the student senate, and developed a taste for political discussion.

Kelly won’t identify as Democrat or Republican (she says she’s a registered Independent), and when I press her on, say, abortion rights, she will only tell me that she’s long been surrounded by people of differing views. “Every single friend I had was pro-choice,” she says. “One of my best friends from childhood has worked as a nurse for Planned Parenthood her entire career. I don’t want to reveal my own personal affiliations, but let’s just say I grew up as I did and then I became a mother of three children and I, too, am Catholic, and so I can see both sides of it very clearly.”

As for her relationship to feminism, Kelly was booed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for refusing to call herself the f-word. Recalling the moment, she rolls her eyes slightly. “I can’t be signing on for that as a news anchor,” she says. “Having worked at Fox News, I understand how that half of the country thinks, and I don’t want to alienate them. And I don’t need to ingratiate myself to the other half. If they’re mad at me for not saying I’m a feminist, they’ll get over it. Or they won’t. I can’t help it.”

“We were not out at the women’s march in pussy hats,” said Kelly’s friend, Debra Netschert, a managing director at the investment firm Jennison Associates. “But on the other hand, you could have put her right there on the float for being the one who helped expose the person who brought so many women out in the first place.”

Netschert is talking about Trump, but she might as well also be talking about the late Fox CEO Roger Ailes, who allegedly sexually harassed Kelly and at least 20 other female Fox employees over the course of his reign at the company. Kelly’s decision to come forward about the harassment—and she says she’s described only about “2 percent” of it publicly—has thrown her into the position of workplace advocate for women. It’s a role she takes seriously, if not always predictably. For instance, she wrestles aloud with her feelings about the less-than-assertive methods she resorted to when dealing with Ailes’s initial advances—smiling and laughing in an attempt to defuse the situation.

“I wish I hadn’t done that,” she admits, though she’s quick to say that this is a natural—and not always ineffective—response. The problem, she says, is when women think deflection is the only solution. “The number-one thing I want young women to know is ‘No’ is an available option. ‘No’ is available to you. I used it. And it worked out just fine. I know that that’s not true for everyone, but the point is, I think some women—a lot of women—feel, in the moment, that ‘No’ is an immediate career killer. And so they go along with it.”

As to the perennial question of why she stayed at the job despite her boss’s advances (a question, she suggests, that “only a man would ask”), she says her answer is the same as that of any other target of workplace harassment. “I didn’t want to find another job. I wanted the harassment to stop. And once I managed to make it stop, I was fine. He knocked it off, which was all I ever wanted. And my belief is that we got along because he was a capitalist, and he realized I could be valuable to the bottom line. So he left me alone in that way and did go on to become a mentor to me.”

In talking with Kelly, I can see how her lawyerly ability to see both sides of an issue—how Ailes tormented and championed her—could come across to some as cold or dispassionate. But her friend Netschert, who had no idea who Kelly was until long after they became acquainted through their children (“I live on the Upper West Side. No one watches Fox!”), says Kelly is simply pragmatic, if reflexively resistant to a certain strain of touchy-feely liberalism. She lets her kids eat Lucky Charms cereal, for instance—“I hope I’m not throwing Megyn under the bus for saying that!” says Netschert—and takes an automatically skeptical approach to any issue tied to identity politics. Like most of her Fox colleagues, Kelly made a sport of inveighing against the safe spaces and trigger warnings demanded by “special snowflakes” on some college campuses (her term of choice for this phenomenon is “cupcake nation”). As she sees it, shutting down speakers and professors who push past intellectual comfort zones is a symptom not just of the divisive nature of the times but of a new kind of human fragility.

“What I want to say to these people is that you should never feel dehumanized or other-ized by some stranger who has almost no connection to you,” Kelly tells me. “If a news anchor or a college professor can make you feel less than human, then that is a problem that you have and that you need to look at yourself to fix.”

This kind of statement, logical as it sounds (at least to me), will be maddening to those on the left committed to dismantling structures of privilege, which someone as successful as Kelly embodies as much as anyone alive today. They will argue that Kelly’s ability to be cavalier about her own power is a direct result of all the work done by women who came before her, who proudly wore the mantle of feminism. But Kelly (despite all the shouting she facilitated in her previous job) is wary of the idea that louder is better when it comes to advancing any cause.

“It’s not wrong to use your voice,” she tells me. “But you have to use it wisely. I think women in our generation who were handed this golden opportunity by the women who came right before us understand that. The next generation, I think, may be struggling with what their obligation is toward advancing women and women’s rights. I think they may be a little off the golden path.”

In the current cultural and political climate, those are fighting words. And for someone who wants to deliver television news—or at least “newsy television”—in a way that will leave viewers feeling like they’ve improved the state of their souls, finding the right balance of honesty and empathy could be very tricky indeed.

Kelly isn’t worried. She’s reveling in her freedom, the ability to be herself rather than an extension of a brand. “I just think there’s more to do out there,” she says simply. “You can get angry, incendiary, make-you-feel-outraged discussions on cable news. But I don’t see a ton of nuanced, thoughtful, respectful, meaningful discussions of these issues on daytime television right now. And we’re about to.”

In this story:
Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham.
Hair: Lucas Wilson; Makeup: Grace Ahn; Manicure: Yuko Tsuchihashi.
Produced by Mary Clancey Pace for Hen’s Tooth Productions.
Photographed at Antonucci Cafe, Upper East Side.