Megyn Kelly Goes There on Epstein

You’d think a woman who publicly went through years of harassment from Donald Trump would have learned something about misogyny.

Megyn Kelly has been obnoxious for so long that at this point, it feels less like a personality trait and more like a political science case study. Long before she became the YouTube auntie of white grievance culture, she was already a comet of culture-war nonsense, lighting up Fox News with moments like insisting Santa Claus is white — one of those claims so embarrassing that even conservatives winced.

Her exit from Fox was newsworthy enough that journalists covered it like a natural disaster—especially when she revealed that accusing Roger Ailes of sexual harassment felt like a “career suicide mission,” a phrase that said more about Fox’s internal rot than it did about her bravery. And yet, the woman who once cast herself as a casualty of misogyny somehow had no trouble becoming a repeat offender in a different lane of bigotry when the spotlight turned her way.

After years of culture-war theater at Fox, she somehow managed to mainstream herself at NBC, which, in hindsight, remains one of the boldest miscalculations in recent TV history. Studios thought that if Charlize Theron played her in a movie like Bombshell, maybe real-life Megyn could pull off being a wholesome morning host for a network that still pretends it’s the older sibling of network news. That illusion lasted roughly six months before the now-infamous blackface comments detonated her career and left NBC execs staring into the camera like a mockumentary cutaway. She vanished from the air while her future “remained in doubt,” which is a polite way of saying the entire experiment had blown up so spectacularly that even NBC’s PR team gave up trying to spin it.

Still, the beautiful part—for her anyway—is that NBC paid her $69 million to go away. Only in America can a white woman get fired for defending blackface and walk away with enough money to retire twice. Megyn Kelly didn’t fail upward; she failed into generational wealth. She was literally rewarded for being so publicly wrong that HR had to treat her like a radioactive object and wheel her out of the building wrapped in corporate cellophane. If bigotry were a cryptocurrency, Megyn Kelly would have been the early investor who cashed out at the perfect time.

But this time, the trolling got away from her. Because Megyn Kelly has opinions the way junk food has nutrients—they’re technically there, but nobody is fooled. She graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in political science and earned her J.D. from Albany Law School, which means she’s a learned woman. A lawyer. Someone who passed the bar. Someone who should understand the difference between statutory rape and consenting adults. Someone who should know that “15-year-old girls” are not “barely legal.” And yet, when you’ve been in the bigotry business as long as she has, thoughts get replaced with increasingly stupid provocations. That’s why she sat on her show recently insisting Jeffrey Epstein “wasn’t a pedophile” because he was “into barely legal girls,” as though that distinction is anything but repulsive.

And here’s the truth: while Megyn often acts dumb on her YouTube show, I don’t think it’s an act. Bigotry is her safe place. Stereotypes are her comfort foods. This is the same woman who routinely goes after Joy Reid and Jemele Hill with a level of weird obsession that radiates insecurity. She openly celebrated when MSNBC fired Joy Reid, which tells you everything you need to know about how she sees the world. She’d rather be a foot soldier for the patriarchy than stand in solidarity with women who don’t worship the same cultural hierarchies she does. Psychologists call this pattern part of the patriarchal bargain, where women align themselves with male power structures because distancing themselves from other women offers rewards they could never get through solidarity. I’ve written about these archetypes before in my own analysis of white women weaponizing insecurity against Black women, and Megyn walks straight out of central casting.

You’d think a woman who publicly went through years of harassment from Donald Trump would have learned something about misogyny. Trump once called her “nasty” and blasted her debate questions, as documented when he attacked her in the very moment she later helped deliver his closing message. Their entire beef, as another outlet noted, is now under the bridge. Translation: Megyn Kelly crawled right back to the movement that dehumanized her because the validation of right-wing men means more to her than dignity.

But I wasn’t surprised—not even a little—when she came crawling back to MAGA. For someone like Kelly, it will always be easier to roll around in the pig slop than to pretend she can be America’s sweetheart on the Today Show. NBC learned that the hard way when they essentially sacrificed a journalist like Tamron Hall, who actually had credibility, news instincts, and on-air discipline. NBC pushed her aside because they thought if they slathered enough makeup onto Megyn Kelly, maybe she could transform into a morning-show cupcake with broad appeal. But Megyn Kelly was not made for charm. She was made for grievance. Bigotry is her love language. That is where she feels whole.

And here’s the part that genuinely twists my stomach: Megyn Kelly is a survivor of sexual harassment. She lived through it. She spoke out about it. She got paid millions because of it. And yet she still has no problem trying to qualify what “kind” of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was, as though sexual exploitation comes with friendly labels and inoffensive categories. She was out there splitting hairs like an HR rep afraid of offending predators, pretending there’s some moral difference between raping pre-teen children and raping teenagers. There is no universe where that kind of mental gymnastics is morally defensible, and the commentary analyzing her remarks makes it clear how grotesque her framing was—especially when she tried to lean on an unnamed source to justify it, as outlined in the Mother Jones breakdown of her Epstein commentary.

If there is justice in the world, her blonde hair and blue eyes won’t save her from the backlash she’s earned here. Megyn Kelly is a woman without a bottom. Every time you think she’s reached her floor, she pulls out a shovel. She is the kind of white woman who will flip between victimhood and cruelty depending on which serves her brand at the moment. She’ll cry about misogyny one minute, then defend a sexual predator the next. She’ll pretend to be a mainstream moderate one day, then crawl back to Trumpworld the next morning like nothing ever happened. Her only constant is self-interest dipped in grievance.

And maybe that’s the point of all this. Megyn Kelly isn’t confused. She isn’t misinformed. She isn’t naive. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She knows her audience. She knows what sells. She knows that in conservative media, the worse your takes are, the more the algorithm rewards you. She knows that minimizing pedophilia is not a bug—it’s a signal to a base that has spent years normalizing extremism, cruelty, conspiracy, and abuse. She’s not speaking to America. She’s speaking to the only people who still clap for her.

The tragedy—and the comedy—is that she thinks this will end differently than the last time she tried to reinvent herself. It won’t. The slop is her ecosystem, and she keeps proving it. You can’t reboot someone whose entire brand is a glitch. Bigotry was her origin story, and it’s her final resting place. And if this latest stunt is any indication, even the MAGA pigpen might be getting tired of the smell.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons.

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