by Megyn Kelly
Dedication
For My Family
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: Tough Questions
1: No False Praise
2: Mean Girls
3: Silent Night, Holy Night
4: Who’s Getting Hit First?
5: Trial Team Barbie
6: Legally Blond
7: Self-Pity Is Not Attractive
8: Calling and Calling; Nobody’s Home
9: “Who’s Here?” “Me!”
10: Lawyer, Broadcaster, Journalist
11: So Long, Little Miss Perfect
12: Nights of Fear
13: Writing the Wrong Things
14: All the Days of My Life
15: The Best Line
16: Now Everyone’s Here
17: Ready for Prime Time
18: On “Having It All”
19: Election Season
20: The First Debate
21: Fallout
22: Relentless
23: The Trump Tower Accords
24: Paying it Forward
25: Settling for More Today
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Photos
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Tough Questions
Debate day: August 6, 2015. I woke up in Cleveland, excited for what was to come. We had been preparing for this for more than two months—powering through countless meetings, calls, and arguments among members of the debate team as to which questions lived and which died—and tonight would be the culmination of all that hard work. I would be co-moderating the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 election season.
The election had been a mess so far. Still in the running were nearly twenty candidates, most with impressive résumés and a long list of accomplishments. That meant we had a real job to do: give the American people some actual information on these contenders so they could begin deciding who they might want to replace Barack Obama. The lower-polling candidates, those ranking below tenth, would appear in a separate “undercard” debate. We only had to worry about those polling in the top ten: Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, John Kasich, and Chris Christie.
I’m an overpreparer, so I had researched and rewritten my questions over and over again until I believed they were as tight and pointed as possible. Before getting out of bed, I looked at my iPhone, which was where I kept the questions. I scrolled through them yet again, toggling back and forth between that file and incoming texts and e-mails from friends and colleagues: Knock ’em dead! Good luck! You’ll do great!
I ordered breakfast in my room, threw on some jeans and a T-shirt, and out the door I went. I felt great. It was a beautiful day in Ohio, and I was as ready as I’d ever be for that night’s event.
The car picked me up at my hotel at 10:00 a.m. to take me to the convention center. The debate team was going to meet one last time to go over the questions and logistics, and to take into account any news of the day.
“Oh, Ms. Kelly!” the driver said when I got into the car. “I’m a huge fan of yours! I want to help you. I will answer phones for you. I will do anything you want me to do today. I will iron your suit. I will run errands. May I go get you a coffee?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Let me get you a coffee!” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m really okay. They have coffee there.”
“I insist!” he said. “I’m going to Starbucks to get you a coffee!”
Now, I don’t really like Starbucks coffee. I prefer plain old convention center coffee, and a lot of it. But I didn’t want to be rude, so I said, “Okay.”
I walked into the hall feeling fine, excited that this day had finally arrived.
Once there, I ran into Howie Kurtz, our Fox News media critic. I remember telling him that if the public had any idea what had been happening between me and Donald Trump the past few days, it would be the biggest story in the country. Among other things, he had threatened me in an angry phone call, called Fox News executives to complain that my coverage of him was not to his liking, and made multiple attempts to interfere in the debate process. Trump had announced his candidacy only two months earlier, and he was already the front-runner for the nomination.
Howie, good reporter that he is, wanted to know more.
“Someday,” I told him.
Little did I know how that story—a few phone calls and some menacing words from a candidate few thought had any real chance—would pale in comparison to the one that would emerge that night on the debate stage and that would come to dominate the next year of my life.
The night before the debate, I’d called my friend and colleague Dana Perino, former White House press secretary under George W. Bush and now a host on Fox News. She’d already been attacked by Trump. I read her my lead question for him, the question no one was asking, even though it was key to his future as a candidate. Essentially, it was: Given your reputation for saying controversial things about and to women, how will you fare against a female candidate? Dana said she thought it was fair. So did I, but we both knew that Trump wouldn’t like it, and there could be blowback. He had tried to embarrass Dana on Twitter after she criticized his announcement speech. And that was just for a passing comment she made on the air. This was a presidential debate stage. I didn’t want to be attacked, but I had a job to do, and that was that.
I joined the fellow members of my debate team inside the Cleveland Cavaliers stadium. My co-moderators, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, our digital politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, and Bill Sammon, the head of our debate team and Washington bureau chief, were all there, along with our producers and limited support staff. We tend to keep these meetings small—the questions are inviolate. Leaks would be unthinkable. This is a race for the Oval Office. There can be no improprieties. No cell phone calls inside this room, no outsiders unless they are sworn to secrecy. The five of us knew one another very well—our strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies—and were full of respect for the team.
There was no time to waste, and we got right to work. Bret, Chris, and I were bunched together at the end of the long conference table. Bill Sammon was next to us, pacing. Everyone else was scattered about. We spent a fair amount of the morning reviewing Bret’s opening question one last time: Would they all pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee?
We wondered if anyone would raise their hand, other than possibly Trump or Rand Paul. Were we still comfortable with that opening? It would be a dramatic and potentially important moment, we knew, and we kept it.
We had a number of other questions to discuss. What if everyone wanted a chance to respond to a likely opening attack by Trump? Would any candidates be looking for “a Newt Gingrich moment,” where they went after the moderators, as Newt had in 2012? What would we do if Trump attacked me? I told Bret and Chris, “Don’t jump in.”
We were on LeBron James’s turf, and we were pumped for the start of the game.
About ninety minutes into our meeting, Abigail Finan, my assistant, came in with a large Starbucks coffee.
“Did you order coffee from your driver?” she asked, confused.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
Abby put the coffee down in front of me, and the meeting continued.
Oh, what the hell, I thought, and I started drinking the Starbucks.
Within fifteen minutes, about halfway through the coffee, I got a splitting headache.
Could you get me some Tylenol? I e-mailed
Abby. She sent someone in with it, but only one pill. At 12:38 p.m. I e-mailed, There’s only one here—I need two.
Within fifteen minutes of that, I was white as a ghost. It was very clear I was going to throw up. I had a little private office in the convention hall. I sprinted out of the meeting and past Abby and my research assistant Emily Walker, ran into the bathroom, and threw up. I came out and told Abby what had happened.
Her eyes were enormous. It was just a few hours before the debate. We were expecting millions of viewers. All the candidates would be there. We had been preparing for months. The stakes were enormous. The timing could not have been worse.
“It’s nerves!” Abby said, hopefully.
It was not nerves, and she and I both knew it. I’d done presidential debates before, and been on TV in front of millions of people more times than I could count. Nerves are rare for me at this point. And when I do get them, what happens is that my heart starts pounding so hard that I worry the microphones will pick it up. What does not happen is nausea.
I tried to go back into the debate room, but when I got there, I was shaky and very ill. The conversation around me was whizzing at warp speed. I wasn’t able to concentrate. I felt terrible. Soon I realized I had to throw up again.
Was the milk in that coffee spoiled? I wondered. Did I get food poisoning at breakfast? My illness came on so suddenly, and was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. But I was in no position to open a CSI investigation. I could barely stand. (I later learned there was a stomach virus going around—Rand Paul was also sick that night.)
“I have some very bad news,” I told the team. “I don’t feel well, and I need to go back to the hotel right now to lie down.”
You should have seen those guys’ faces. They were scared shitless. We were a team. We were going to do this together. What’s more, it was very clear that Bret and Chris did not want to ask my questions. And I didn’t want them to—especially my question about Trump’s history of controversial comments about women. It was my question, it was on point, and I wanted to be the one asking it.
The guys were supportive. They could see that I looked like I was about to pass out.
“Go,” they said. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
“We’ll see you later,” they said as I walked out. It was as much a question as a statement.
It was all I could do to make it back to the hotel before I was hanging over the toilet, violently ill.
En route, Abby called my doctor in New York. He prescribed medication over the phone. Once I was back in my room, she went and picked it up.
“Take this pill,” she said when she returned, after a rather horrific hour. “The doctor says if you can keep it down for thirty minutes, you’ll feel better.”
Who knew that, thanks to modern medicine, you don’t have to throw up anymore in this country? To this day, I still don’t know what Abby gave me. I didn’t care; I would have taken anything if it meant I might be able to make the debate.
As I lay there in bed, curled up in a fetal position, my hair matted on my face, profusely sweating, barely able to speak, I saw the look in Abby’s eyes: She’s never going to make this debate! DEFCON 1! DEFCON 1!
It was 3:28 p.m. I did everything I could to keep my stomach calm for thirty minutes to hold down that pill. I looked out the window and stared at spiders on a spiderweb. I tried Pandora. I meditated. I started chanting, “One, one, one, one . . .” I said a prayer.
Abby was counting me down: “Eleven more minutes! Seven more minutes! Almost there!”
My husband, Doug, called, and I couldn’t even speak.
Finally, I made it to thirty. Lo and behold, by forty I felt a flicker of promise. By fifty minutes later, I was definitely starting to feel a bit better. By sixty there was no question that I was going to get out of that bed.
My boss, Roger Ailes, called and offered words of encouragement: “I know you can do this.” He also knew me: I would have walked over hot coals to do that debate.
By ninety minutes, the clock read 5:00, and I was back at the convention center. My hair and makeup geniuses Chris and Vincenza transformed that gross, sweaty, shaky mess into what people the world over saw on TV that night. I will be forever grateful.
Still, I had chills, so we traded my sleeveless white dress for a black one that covered me up more. My producers couldn’t find a heater, so they gave me a blanket to put on my legs, along with an empty trash can to go at my feet. If worse came to worst, we would kill the mics and take the camera off me, and I would throw up right there on the debate stage.
The one advantage of all this was that I felt no nerves onstage. I was too wiped out physically, and focused like a laser on not vomiting in front of millions of people. I did, however, have a premonition that night. I remember feeling like the earth’s tectonic plates were shifting—as if I could feel it beneath me, in real time. Somehow, I knew things were about to change. I said exactly that to Abby and Emily Walker, moments before I went out there. They locked eyes with me, and with a deep breath I looked back at them.
“Onward,” I said, and walked out toward the stage.
Early in the debate, I exchanged pleasantries with Donald Trump, the front-runner. Then I asked him the question that would change my life.
“Mr. Trump,” I said, “one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides. In particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’”
“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” he quipped.
The crowd chuckled at his Rosie O’Donnell comment. I passed no judgment on the audience, but I was not going to join them in laughing.
“For the record,” I said, “it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.”
Trump knew it too. “I’m sure it was,” he said.
We had fact-checked every word of that question. Rosie had, no question, been vicious toward Trump too, and if it had only been her, I would not have asked that question. But what I’d seen in my research binder was that he’d made a habit of attacking women regularly with these sorts of terms—mocking their looks and sexualizing them. The women he’d belittled in the terms I used in my question included, but were not limited to, Arianna Huffington, Bette Midler, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, and a lawyer requesting a prearranged break to pump breast milk for her baby (“disgusting”). There were many, many others.
“Your Twitter account,” I continued, “has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the ‘war on women’?”
First Trump said that we’d gotten too politically correct in this country. And then this: “What I say is what I say. And honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”
He looked angry, I thought. After all my planning for that moment, I was relieved that he hadn’t attacked me personally in his response. Still, I felt his anger, and understood him perfectly. He was making a veiled but very clear threat.
I’d known Trump for several years by this point. We’d had a mostly good—but also complicated—relationship. Seared into my mind was a threat he’d made to me by phone just four days earlier to “unleash” what he called his “beautiful Twitter account” on me. I expected I would find out what he meant by that soon, and indeed I would.
Trump’s answer—“What I say is what I say”—would become a mantra for his campaign, and it would be very successful for him. I’m not like the other politicians, he told America. I don’t care if you don’t like it. His willi
ngness to drop a swear and cut through the bull and tell it like it is—it was refreshing in a way. And it made for great TV.
But of course, as with anything along those lines, there are limits to that refreshment. Someone can tell it like it is and then drop the N-word on you, and suddenly you’re not feeling refreshed any longer; you’re just feeling offended. I’m no lover of being overly PC, but there is a limit to how far the overcorrection to that can go. You can’t justify everything that way. We still want to live within the bounds of decency with one another, or so I hope—especially when choosing leaders, whose behavior should inspire us and may be modeled by our children. They should be held to a higher standard.
For what it’s worth, I thought Trump did fine with the question. But I do believe that in that moment he felt betrayed. He said it: “I’ve been very nice to you.” As if we were friends in the sandbox and I’d stolen his toy, when in fact he was a presidential candidate trying to get elected, and I was a journalist trying to do my job.
“. . . although I could probably maybe not be . . .”
I knew what he meant: I told you if you gave me a hard time, I would come after you, and now I will.
Then, as the world knows, he did.
And then, as the world also knows, I survived.
I was raised with strong values, and had spent much of my life to that point seeing my character tested. I was viciously bullied in middle school. My father died when I was a teenager. As a lawyer, I worked eighteen-hour days immersed in acrimony. As a cub reporter, I was targeted by a violent stalker. Once I became a well-known news anchor, I accepted without complaint the scrutiny that comes with that role. I’d also navigated my way through plenty of sexism from powerful men. So I suppose I was as prepared as anyone could be to spend the 2016 election being targeted by the likely Republican nominee.
Yet still, the chaos Trump unleashed was of a completely different order than anything I’d encountered before—than anything any journalist has encountered at the hands of a presidential candidate in the history of modern American politics.
