by Megyn Kelly
Slowly but surely, I was learning that having a family might not be an impediment to my career. This allowed me to pursue motherhood as enthusiastically as my career without fear that the two were incompatible. Working mothers go through enough as it is; to have a company that makes it easy on you is an enormous boon.
I thoroughly enjoyed my stint in the afternoons. In retrospect, I think I didn’t know how good I had it. I was on TV two hours a day, anchoring a show that was succeeding. I had a major role in election coverage, including presidential debates, and was always offered a role on any big story. I was moderately well known, but not to the point where it was life-changing. And I felt like I was succeeding and had balance—an elusive achievement for any working parent.
Relaxed at the anchor desk, I started to take more risks. I battled fiercely with then-congressman Anthony Weiner—who was smug and condescending at times but terrific TV—on matters like the death tax and Obamacare. Weiner liked to fight, and I figured, what the hell. Almost all of these segments went viral. I sparred with former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo, who came on the show and said President Obama should be impeached—“All right, Congressman, that’s ridiculous,” I said. “How does this raise the level of debate?”
Dr. Keith Ablow came on and tried to say Chaz Bono shouldn’t be allowed on Dancing with the Stars because watching him could turn kids transgender—a preposterous notion. I told him, “To me, it seems like you’re adding to the hate.” It felt like another driving-eighty-miles-per-hour-on-a-suburban-street moment—just call it for what it is. While some accused me of overstepping my bounds, I didn’t mind the brushback. I was starting to learn, it’s part of the job.
I continued my weekly stint with Bill O’Reilly. We had a few epic battles that made big headlines, particularly over First Amendment issues. For example, O’Reilly had been railing on the vile Westboro Baptist Church, the group that protests the funerals of dead military veterans with posters that read “God hates fags” and include other hateful, bigoted, antigay messages. I forcefully condemned the group’s protests, but defended their legal right to do it, explaining to Bill that this was classic free speech. He thought I was out of my skull. I wasn’t very popular, defending the right of these hateful people to protest near a grieving military family, but the law is the law, and I called it as I saw it. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court agreed with me, upholding the First Amendment rights of this so-called church, in an eight-to-one decision. In pushing myself to take risks, I’d found a new comfort zone, a growing sense of authority.
And then I got pregnant again—within nine months of Yates’s birth. As with my first pregnancy, I became more emotional than usual. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office with Doug, waiting to take the blood test to see if I really was expecting. The show The Price Is Right was on the waiting room TV. On at that moment was the game where you try to match four items with their prices, then pull a lever to see if you’ve matched them correctly. The female contestant, an African American woman in her sixties, ran around frantically trying to match the items. With no time to spare, she did it! And she won a new car! She was elated! Doug looked over at me. I had tears streaming down my face.
“I think the blood test is just a formality at this point,” he said.
As I grew bolder on the air, I also grew bolder off the air. When Fox PR asked me if I’d want to pose for GQ, I said sure. Well, I thought, that would be a fun way to mark hitting forty. It never occurred to me not to do it. I never considered that I might have to choose between being a serious newswoman and publicly showing a saucier side of myself in a respected magazine.
So I did, and it was fun, though I grew a bit concerned about how much my pregnancy was showing when the photographer said to me, “You’re very brave.” I was wearing a black slip that looked identical to a dress I’d worn to the Correspondents’ Association Dinner a year earlier. The only difference was that in this case, I had a bit of cleavage, which I was kind of proud of—my baby had created something not normally there.
There was some backlash when the issue came out. Some fellow female journalists e-mailed me asking, Why? Why would you do that?
I felt no need to justify it. I don’t buy into that line of thinking that says we must only be these hard-charging professionals or we sacrifice our credibility. By this point, I had zero fear that people were not going to take me seriously. I wrote back the same thing to all of them: “It’s like holding your crying baby on the airplane and looking around at the other passengers. Those who get it require no apology, and those who don’t, never will.”
I believe I fit into a new archetype for women that thankfully we’re seeing more often: multidimensional. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow recently alluded to this when she was honored at Variety’s Power of Women event,1 noting that in modern-day America it’s possible for a woman to be “nurturing, maternal, sexual.” The same is true for women outside of Hollywood—you can be a tough questioner on a presidential debate stage and someone who does softer interviews that play more to a subject’s humanity, like Barbara Walters. You can be playful and sexy in GQ and sophisticated and feminine on the cover of Vanity Fair. You can be a doting mother and a tough professional. You can have class and drop a good swear once in a while. You can just be you—whoever you happen to be.
I had similar blowback after I went on Howard Stern’s show. Journalists from Anderson Cooper to Barbara Walters have done the same, but my appearance was treated as unprecedented by some. Stern is a great interviewer—provocative as hell, that’s obvious, but fun and probing and clever. I enjoyed it immensely. That visit, too, was PG-13—even Howard would later say (after Trump and some of his fans attacked my Stern appearance years later) that I had been a complete lady on the program. And being a lady doesn’t mean ignoring all aspects of one’s sexuality, especially on a show known for its fun, bawdy exchanges.
Now, would I have done GQ or Stern one year into broadcasting? Of course not. But I had already established myself as a serious person by the time I took these risks. And I was trying to reach out to viewers who might not normally watch Fox News. Some believe a newswoman shouldn’t go chasing an audience; do a great program, and the audience will come to you. But I figured widening the tent was worth a try. And I still feel that way today.
So that was the beginning of my pregnancy with Yardley. By the end, no men’s magazine would have dreamed of photographing me in a slip. I felt enormous—even more than with my first baby—and the viewers watched me expand by the day, sending lovely, supportive messages (it’s not all vile on Facebook and Twitter). By the end of my nine months, the director of my show had stopped taking side shots of me at the desk. “It’s starting to feel voyeuristic,” he explained. When I look back at clips of the show from that time, I am grateful for his discretion.
In April 2011, I gave birth to our daughter Yardley. She is a ball of fire. She could have negotiated a better Iran deal than John Kerry did. She’s strong. And she knows what she wants. When she was four, I said, “Yards, come sit next to me on this chair. Let’s have a conversation.”
“No,” she said.
“That’s rude,” I said, kidding her.
“What’s also annoying,” she said, “is you telling me how rude I am.” Another time, she agreed to stop sucking her thumb. I saw her go for the thumb that night.
“Yards, I thought you were going to work on not sucking your thumb.”
“I am,” she said, “but not today. Or tomorrow.”
Yardley will run around the living room fifty times before sitting down—the same thing she enjoyed as a baby when my mom would visit and stroll a crying Yardley around and around our dining room table into the wee hours. At school, Doug and I have made it clear that we don’t want them to discipline that energy out of her. I have very few worries about Yardley, because it’s clear she will take life by the reins.
Yards is also very loving, just like Yates. Often I wake up to her gently kissing my forehead. My one f
riend used to wake up to her child lifting up her eyelids. I thought, My God, that sounds awful. I’m grateful that my daughter eases me into the day instead.
Not long ago, she saw me crying at her preschool graduation. “Why are you crying, Mama?” “They’re tears of joy, honey.” And now when she sees me well up, she’ll ask, “Are those joy of tears?” I love that: joy of tears. Because that’s true too.
She sometimes reminds me of a pro wrestler. She is freakishly strong, as is my sister, Suzanne. If you need a jar opened or a dresser moved? They are your girls. That trait skipped me, but Yards has the gift. She can pick any of us up, and constantly tries to. Her younger brother doesn’t particularly enjoy Yardley hauling him around, but it’s his own fault for being so cute and portable.
Yardley and Yates have a special relationship. Once, she asked him, “Yates, are we friends?”
Yates looked over at her. “We’re brother and sister, Yards, but we’re also friends.”
With Yardley, I took another four-month maternity leave. Unlike America’s Newsroom, this leave was different, because I knew I’d be returning to this anchor post. I worried a bit: Would the viewers forget about me? Would my ratings dip while I was out?
I decided not to sweat that, to just focus on my children and see what happened. Lo and behold, we used fill-in anchors, and the world kept turning on its axis. My job was still there waiting for me after my leave was over. And why? Because I was good at it. They wanted me in the chair. All that time I could have spent asking for opportunities, I had channeled instead into getting better. The work paid off. My job was secure.
Returning to America Live after Yardley was as it had been with Yates—hard. But I muddled through. One of the things about TV is, you have to play hurt, and you have to do it convincingly. You can’t go out and mope on the job.
On my first day back, I had a spirited back-and-forth with radio host Mike Gallagher that attracted a lot of attention. He knew I wanted to discuss his attack on my maternity leave, which he had publicly mocked while I was out. I respected that he showed up, knowing we were going there.
“Is maternity leave, according to you, a racket?” I asked him on air.2
“Well, do men get maternity leave?” he said with a jocular smile on his face.
“Guess what? Yes, they do,” I shot back with a grin. “It’s called the Family and Medical Leave Act.”
Indeed, if men would like to take three months off to care for their newborn babies, they can, thanks to the law signed by Bill Clinton. As for women, I pointed out, the United States is the only country in the advanced world that doesn’t require paid maternity leave. Some companies simply offer it because they know it’s the right thing to do. Others are forced to offer unpaid leave, thanks to the FMLA. Still others have no policy at all. A staggering one in four new moms return to work after just two weeks’ maternity leave.3 That is seriously wrong.
I wanted to know what it was about carrying a baby for nine months and then giving birth that Gallagher didn’t think warranted “a few months off so bonding and recovery can take place.”
Having had two babies by this point, I was amused at his notion that maternity leave was somehow a “vacation.” Up all night, nursing a newborn, breasts in pain, sleep-deprived, physically depleted, completely exhausted, with zero time to even shower—it didn’t feel much like a trip to the Bahamas.
It was a good-natured exchange—Gallagher’s a good guy—but he knew I had him. I heard from viewers that the exchange opened a few eyes on the issue. And yet that staunch defender of liberal principles Jon Stewart apparently took offense—can you say Fox Derangement Syndrome?4
Stewart went on the air a night later and offered a lengthy hit piece, criticizing my push for better maternity leave for women.5 To say his presentation was dishonest would be a gross understatement. Stewart played earlier clips of me appearing to question things like food stamps, suggesting that I was against any entitlements except ones that might benefit me. This was way off base. For one thing, as a news anchor, I would never take a position favoring or opposing entitlements. I get paid to play devil’s advocate. This is my job; it’s pretty straightforward.
Moreover, Stewart’s assertion that I was pushing for government-mandated maternity leave (i.e., an “entitlement”) assumed too much. Maybe I’m for that, maybe I’m not—I’ve never said publicly, and I’m not about to here. But touting the value of “paid leave” does not necessarily mean support for any government involvement; it could mean we ought to pressure employers to voluntarily offer this benefit, as mine does, which has been proven to help families and to attract and retain top female talent.
And finally, the notion that advocating for paid leave would somehow benefit me was absurd. I work for Fox News. My deals are by contract. No policies need to be changed for me to get paid maternity leave. Nor is it generally people in positions like mine for whom this is an issue. I have bargaining power, and I’m also well paid. Many are not so fortunate.
Stewart used to attack me fairly often during America Live. I spent far too much time worrying about these hits. I was young and still apprehensive of him. I feared that his attacks, however unfounded, were going to hurt me. He was very beloved. And, disturbingly, he was the primary news source for millions of young people, men in particular. Abby grew to loathe him.
“I’m a comic,” he would say when people tried to talk to him about his role in the media or his journalistic responsibility.6 But that was a cop-out. He wanted to be taken seriously on many issues—and he was, and he knew he was—as when he laudably advocated for 9/11 first responders. But he wanted to deny that reality when it suited him to do so.
One time on the air, I jokingly called Stewart “mean.”
He picked up the phone and called me. He had me on the phone for over an hour, wanting to know why I thought he was mean. I told him that he took things out of context.
“We do not!” he said.
“You absolutely do all the time.”
“Give me an example.”
I gave him the example of the hit piece on my maternity leave.
“No,” he said. “I had you on that! Totally self-serving!”
“Absolutely wrong.” I pointed out the fallacy of his argument, including the fact that my maternity leave was set by contract and I needed no government mandate to get it.
He did not back down. “You would benefit because you would get ‘psychic income’ from knowing your comments helped people,” he told me. It was like arguing with Jell-O.
We agreed to disagree. But he seemed genuinely bothered by the notion that I would think him dishonest or mean-spirited.
“This feels like you’ve sinned,” I said, “and you want absolution. Well, I’m not giving it. You’re like the class bully.”
“How?” he wanted to know.
“Because you love to pick on newspeople who can’t respond.”
“What do you mean, you can’t respond?” he said. “You have a show!”
“I’m not Bill O’Reilly,” I explained to him. “I’m a journalist. Most of the people you hit are journalists. What are we going to do, take time away from talking about Syria to address something on Comedy Central? Am I going to have my team waste their time pulling more complete clips to prove your cherry-picked clips are wrong? That’s not what newspeople do. We don’t have the staff or the platforms for that. We’re trying to actually report the news.”
Stewart and I did have one funny exchange in that call he made to me.
“You are the one person at Fox News I actually respect,” he confessed toward the end, in an apparent moment of weakness.
“I hate myself for loving that,” I responded in a weak moment of my own.
We talked a bit about our lives, our kids, our spouses. He spoke about his wife and her pregnancies.
“Just so you know,” I said, “I was sitting on the couch nursing my newborn baby when I saw your latest hit piece on me. Good times.”
&n
bsp; “Not listening! La-la-la-la-la-la! Don’t humanize yourself! La-la-la-la-la-la!”
I laughed, and we moved on—not friends, exactly, but not enemies either.
In retrospect, the Stewart bits don’t bother me at all. But they were a wake-up call that I was now subject to a whole new level of scrutiny, and that I’d better be ready if I was going to make it in this business. I had put myself out there. Public scrutiny is part of the job. I had two choices: stop actually feeling wounded, or acknowledge the difficulty and not let it “dilute the content of my message.” Either way, sitting around feeling sorry for myself was not an option.
I was learning how to do my job under fire. How to be a mother under fire. My children need me, regardless of what’s happening in my professional life. And my viewers do too.
Sad about leaving your baby? Smile and do the news.
Worried about Jon Stewart trying to ruin your career? Smile and do the news.
How did I do that? I remembered who I was. These people didn’t define me. Nor did they control me. Hell, they didn’t even know me. With every hit I’d take, I felt that I was getting stronger. Yep, still standing. Here I am . . . right here.
Functioning in the face of adversity may not be fun, but it is a strength. It wasn’t easy. But with practice, and I had plenty, I developed some grit. Hell, I had walked around the Upper West Side of Manhattan with my baby in a Fox News onesie. I could handle this.
Stewart’s attack on my maternity leave segment didn’t hamper my willingness to engage in strong discussions about women. Just a few months after that attack, Bill O’Reilly and I went head-to-head on sexism. He had told Judge Jeanine Pirro to “calm down” on his show as she was making an entirely legitimate argument. I was on a day later. “It’s patronizing,” I told him. “And it has a special connotation when a man says it to a woman on top of that.”
