Even before fans lashed out this week over her crazy piece about “barely legal” minor rape survivors, veteran news actress Megyn Kelly had already flirted with bad taste on more than one occasion. A few days before she ranted about pedophilia on The Megyn Kelly Show In the podcast, Kelly weighed in on the feud between right-wing pundits Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin over right-wing anti-Semitism. “Just fucking shut it down, Mark Levin,” Kelly said, siding with Carlson after white supremacist Nick Fuentes appeared on his show.
Regarding friendships and family relationships destroyed by politics, Kelly said, “Fuck them.” Those who celebrated the murder of right-wing entertainer Charlie Kirk were “fucking assholes,” Kelly said, dismissing an anti-Kirk sign with a curt “what the fuck is this?” She called the newspaper recording “The fucking New York Times.Of the Democrats, Kelly said, “These guys are radical as hell.”
Well, as Walter Cronkite would no doubt say of twenty-first century podcasts, “That’s just the damn thing.” Kelly's f-bombs here are just a small sample of what she threw at audiences' ears over several days in mid-November on her show, which runs two hours Monday through Friday starting at noon (EST) on Sirius XM. A visual version of the show will be released later that day on YouTube.
With her own Sirius “Megyn Kelly Channel” debuting November 4 and a live performance tour, Kelly is the highlight of the month. Her show launched in late 2020, shortly after she flopped on NBC following her success on Fox News. She joined Sirius in 2022 and her show has been going from strength to strength lately.
But things got weird this Wednesday, even by Kelly's standards, when she discussed dead sexual deviant Jeffrey Epstein and his friendship with President Donald Trump. Kelly, the lawyer, appeared to draw a careful distinction between Trump and Epstein, saying there was a difference between young women and those even younger, and that Trump's alleged sexual escapades as Epstein's partner remained on the legal side while Epstein favored underage victims.
But then she made a sharp turn in legal logic when she quoted an anonymous source who told her: “Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile… He was a 'barely legal' type of admirer. For example, he liked 15-year-old girls… He didn't like 8-year-olds, but he liked very young teenagers who could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legit to a passerby.”
While the legal age of sexual consent in most jurisdictions is between 16 and 18, Kelly (again, she's a lawyer) seemed to imply that the line is fluid and partly determined by the predator, and that it's okay to lure underage women into sexual slavery as long as they reach double digits in age.
“We haven't seen anyone come forward and say, 'I was 8, I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came under his purview,'” Kelly said, as if that vindicated him. “You could say it's a difference without a difference. I think there is a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.”
Regular listeners of Kelly's show tuned in at noon on Friday to find not a live performance but a replay of the show, taped Nov. 7 in Miami in front of a live audience with guests Eric Trump and Piers Morgan. No statement was made about Kelly's absence. Requests to Sirius for comment had not been returned as of midday. Immediately following Friday's replay, Kelly appeared live via phone on “The Megan Kelly Finale Show,” hosted by Emily Yashinsky on the Megyn Kelly Channel. But in the half-hour interview, neither addressed the news of the day: Kelly's comments about Epstein and pedophilia.
Last month, Sirius boasted in a press release that The Megyn Kelly Show is “one of the most popular news shows in the country…regularly ranked in the top 4 news podcasts and top 10 podcasts overall in America on the Apple and Spotify podcast charts.” In the same episode, Kelly declared: “Linear television is dead. People can't stand this stilted, censored conversation.”
Of course, it is uncensored. With her blunt mouth, Kelly makes sharp-tongued comments about the culture war, often condemning transgender people. With the help of a lawyer, Kelly tried to drive a wedge into the union of the LGBTQ community.
“How come these LGB people don’t understand that TQ is weird?” she asked, saying they were “not part of the same universe” and that transgender people undermined youth. “They're trying to turn little gay boys into girls,” she said, shouting theatrically as if trying to sway the jury. “Reject the TQ madness.”
Unlike some talk show hosts, Kelly does not answer listeners' phone calls when he is in his Red Room studio in New York City, but does allow a few questions from viewers during his tour while taping his show on stage with guests. In Atlanta, a Chattanooga teacher told Kelly that Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported some of her former students, now in their twenties, who came to the United States from Mexico as infants.
Since they have no other home, the woman asked, what can Congress do to improve the situation? Nothing, Kelly said. “I think the answer is nothing, because they need to go. [back to Mexico]”,” Kelly said to applause from her live audience. “I'm sorry. I'm not heartless. But we have our own problems… You came down the wrong road and you'll have to leave.”
When Epstein's emails were leaked earlier this week, Kelly did not play down the story as Fox did, devoting the first 36 minutes of Wednesday's show to the scandal. She used terms like “child porn,” “barely legal,” “middle finger,” and “Democrats are salivating right now.”
As for the blame for Epstein's cover-up, she said, “The Republicans got screwed by this game.” As for the unproven allegations against lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Kelly said: “It's a damn lie. It's complete bullshit.” As for the United States attorney general—a Trump staffer who frequently answers Epstein's questions equivocally—Kelly effectively broke the party line: “I have to be honest. I don't really trust what Pam Bondi says about Epstein, she said.
Kelly is definitely a dynamic performer. She varies volume, pace and tone the way a boxer mixes up punches, hooks and crosses: some to the body, some to the head, and some below the belt. Her tour will end on November 22 in Glendale, Arizona, where her guest will be Erica Kirk, Charlie's widow and now a leading figure in white Christian nationalism, dressed as Turning Point USA.
Since the Kirks were a devout and pious couple, let's hope that Widow Kirk is not horrified by Kelly's constant use of this word. fuck in all its forms. Maybe backstage she can whisper the legal age of consent in Kelly's ear. And maybe some Ka-RISS-chin in the audience will step up to the microphone and say, “Megyn, you're better than all of this. Please stop it.”
