by Megyn Kelly
Once I got to prime time, things changed between us in that I became his competitor rather than an afterthought marooned in the afternoon. But that’s what happens with competitive people—they want to win, and it can create a different dynamic. I know I owe a lot to Bill, and I’ll always be grateful for the help he gave me before anyone even knew who I was. Not to mention the terrific lead-in he gives me.
I was thrilled to be able to make my mark in prime time—to spread my wings and do things my own way. I wanted to create a healthy work environment, one where people wanted to come to work each day, where people felt valued, not threatened or ignored. We put up inspirational posters around my team’s pod, bought a high-end coffeemaker, set up weekly office hours for the team to come and see me, and created a Kelly File rewards program where people would be recognized for outstanding work. Look, it’s not exactly Google, but we make an effort. We try to do fun things out of the office together—parties in Central Park or around the holidays, drinks after the show on a particularly challenging night. All of this has fostered a familial kind of relationship among us, and raises the bar for new hires on the show. As my mom likes to say, “Life is too short to surround yourself with unhealthy people.”
As for content, we wanted to look and feel different. I am not an ideologue. Nor am I a pundit, like Bill and Sean around me. I am a news anchor who has come out publicly as an independent. I wanted a show that would surprise people. Enlighten them. A show that would be easy to consume but compelling to watch—as we describe it, like “cool water over a hot brain.” If we nail an unusually dense segment, we’ll say to each other, “Cool water.”
One of my goals on The Kelly File has been to bring on newsmakers who no one else is challenging. To mix it up. To fact-check people. To set the record straight.
In this vein, one of the most satisfying interviews I’ve done to date on the show was with Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorist who belonged to the radical-left Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground.1 Ayers is married to Bernadine Dohrn, who was once on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. (Ayers would later defend Dohrn, saying, “A lot of great people have been on that list.” I’m sure she’s a peach.)
During the 2008 election, it was reported that Barack Obama launched his career in Bill Ayers’s living room. That was a little inflated. They were both in Chicago and in the same social justice circles, and Ayers had a cocktail party for the then aspiring politician. But the reason Ayers was such a good candidate for our show was that he had been all over the news, and no one had really held him to account. Until we came along.
Ayers and his group had terrorized the country in protest against the Vietnam War. They planted bombs in places like the Pentagon, the US Capitol, and the State Department, and when one went off unexpectedly in a New York City town house, it killed four of their own. They were accused by the San Francisco police union of killing a cop. They terrorized a judge and his family with pipe bombs in the middle of the night. The list goes on.
And then they wound up as college professors, because why not? Who else would these institutions, so offended by conservatives like Condi Rice, Ben Shapiro, and Dick Cheney even speaking for a night on campus, invite to teach full time? Folks like Kathy Boudin, who helped kill two police officers in 1981, served twenty-plus years for murder and is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Or Dohrn—the Weather Underground leader who celebrated the Charles Manson murders, including that of the nine-months-pregnant Sharon Tate, with “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly! . . . The Weathermen dig Charles Manson!”—who went on to teach at Northwestern Law School, one of the best schools in the country. And her husband, Ayers, spent his post-terrorist life teaching at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Is it me, or is this a problem?
A quick note on what’s happening on our college campuses these days. Some in the younger generation today seem determined to shut down any opinions that don’t happen to match their own (typically progressive) values. I believe this is not only boneheaded but bad for us as a society. We are becoming what I have dubbed a Cupcake Nation, trying to eliminate offensive or even differing viewpoints and, with them, our grit and resilience.
I am a big First Amendment advocate, and I do what I can to call attention to the attacks on it—whether it’s the we-can’t-function-if-exposed-to-unpleasant-language college kids who need a “safe space” to discuss any social issue, or the universities writ large who want to banish all speech that doesn’t quite line up with their values.
I believe in the right to offend. To insult. Even to horrify. It’s not that we’re supposed to enjoy it; it’s that we’re supposed to allow it and then respond in a more persuasive voice. That’s the bedrock of the First Amendment—the answer to speech you do not like is not less speech, it’s more speech.
In addition to defending the free speech rights of the vile Westboro Baptist Church, I’ve also defended the free speech rights of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who comes on The Kelly File among very few other shows. She’s a Somalian human rights activist who underwent genital mutilation as a young girl, as mandated by her Islamic faith. Hirsi Ali has since become an outspoken critic of Islam, and is under a death threat issued by Islamist extremists. Still, she bravely speaks out. Amazingly, some American universities and critics would like to silence her. Yes, she’s said some controversial things about Islam, but the First Amendment exists to protect controversial speech, not speech we love that ruffles no feathers. Hirsi Ali deserves her say, and when a critic tried to silence her on my show, I shot back at him, “When you undergo genital mutilation, you may have a thing or two to say about it!”
I was also vocal in my defense of Pamela Geller, a controversial figure who held a “Draw Muhammad” contest and then faced an attempt on her life by radical Muslims. Others (including Trump) blamed Geller, saying she had essentially invited her own attempted murder. I maintained that Geller’s behavior was at the heart of the First Amendment, especially given its provocative nature.
Unlike Hirsi Ali, Ayers was not banned from college campuses; instead he was revered on them—another reason why my sit-down with him was perhaps the most compelling thing I’ve done on television. For decades, Ayers had been allowed to pass himself off as nothing more than a Vietnam War protester who set off a few explosive devices and no one got hurt.
Nonsense. He terrorized people, including children. His group committed murder. Some academic types were so determined to reward him for his opposition to the war that he was given a relative pass for years. But he did not get a pass on The Kelly File. Nor was he allowed to dodge and weave with his usual retorts of “No one was hurt.”
Yes, they were.
New York Times columnist and all-around ball-buster Maureen Dowd pulled me aside at an event years later and said of the Ayers exchange, “That’s when I knew you were a great journalist. Great.” Like most human beings, I love positive feedback, especially from people I respect, but what I really loved about that moment was it showed how the Ayers interview had penetrated beyond our typical audience.
Of course, Bill Ayers wasn’t the kind of person likely to show up on Fox News. Hannity—to his credit—had been attempting to shine a light on Ayers in the weeks leading up to the 2008 election, because of the alleged Ayers-Obama connection. But those questions were largely dismissed.
Dinesh D’Souza, a guest on The Kelly File, had interviewed Ayers for a movie D’Souza had made called America: Imagine the World without Her, about American exceptionalism and those who reject it. We had booked D’Souza for a July 4 special, but needed someone to argue against him. He told me privately, “I think I can get Ayers for you.” Sure enough, he did it.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when Ayers walked in the door. We hid him in the building like he was Justin Bieber at a middle school prom. We knew someone would try to poach him, and we couldn’t let that happen, so we stuck him in a part of the basement no one uses at Fox under the
dutiful watch of two staffers.
Lo and behold, at the appointed hour, Bill Ayers walked onto my set. He sat down across from me, and what a moment. The next hour between us was extraordinary television. I worked very hard to prepare for that day. I had read up on Ayers, his group, and their crimes—both alleged and proven—for weeks. My team and I had read his books, listened to his radio interviews—you name it. There were many late-night meetings with my staff, who were as committed as I was to making sure we had our facts straight. We’d located riveting clips of him. And he had written about much of it in his book—though he’d clearly forgotten some of what he’d said.
For example, he denied that the Weather Underground bombed the home of Judge John Murtagh, where Murtagh’s nine-year-old son was sleeping. I confronted Ayers with a passage from his own book: “Two weeks before the townhouse explosion, four members of this group had firebombed Judge Murtagh’s house in New York” (emphasis mine).
“I didn’t write that,” said Ayers, caught flat-footed.
“It’s in your book!” I countered, with a graphic ready and on the screen.
There was no way out for him. The audience knew.
We followed up later on in the show with the little Murtagh boy, now all grown up, to describe what it was like to wake up to his home being bombed and to respond to Ayers’s claims about no one ever getting hurt.
We also had on FBI agents and NYPD officers who had investigated Ayers’s many crimes and who explained why they were convinced he had perpetrated not just the bombings but also many other crimes.
For the first time, Bill Ayers was fully outed. It was a service to the truth. The interview was picked up everywhere. People began clamoring for their own Ayers interviews. He granted one to a far-left website, saying about me,2 “She’s like a cyborg constructed in the basement of Fox News. She’s very striking, but very metallic, very cold. Her eyes are very cold.”
Ayers was the gift that kept on giving. I responded to that with a humorous bit on our show in which I showed a picture of my eyes looking lovingly at Doug in an interview Doug had done on The Kelly File, and then a shot of me looking stonily at Ayers, suggesting that my coldness might have had something to do with the man in front of me. The Ayers interview put The Kelly File on the map, as dynamic, different, hard-hitting journalism. It garnered enormous ratings, and Fox ran it and reran it again and again for months.
Not long after that, in September 2014, I landed an exclusive interview with another infamous and reclusive professor, Ward Churchill. Churchill was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder. He’d written an essay in 2001 called “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in which he called those murdered in the Twin Towers on 9/11 “little Eichmanns” (Nazi Adolf Eichmann having orchestrated the Holocaust and been executed for it).
Lest you think he was quoted out of context, here’s more of that paragraph:
True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire. . . . If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.3
This was protected speech, no doubt. The college was a public university, and he was a tenured professor. Except in very limited circumstances, the First Amendment doesn’t allow a government body, like a public school, to punish someone for the content of their speech. Still, the school, under pressure from its alumni, found an excuse to cut him loose. He tried suing, but with mixed results.
On The Kelly File, I pressed him on his outlandish statements about the 9/11 victims. He did not dial them back, and at one point became slightly threatening. The interview was tense. I was strong with him as he continued to condemn America and to argue that we deserved the 9/11 attacks and more.
“Do you believe the United States ought to be bombed?” I asked.
“I think the United States by its own rules is subject to being bombed.”
“You can’t answer the question.”
“Yeah, I have answered the question, I say the United States should comply with law!”
“Yes or no, do we deserve to be bombed?”
“If it does not comply with law, it opens itself up to it.”
“Why can’t you have the courage to just answer honestly? Yes, or no? Do we deserve to be bombed? Just say it if you think it’s true,” I pressed.
Churchill leaned forward across the anchor desk a bit—slightly, but noticeably, in my space. He lowered his baritone voice. He was angry. I wondered where this was going. I did not budge.
“I say, that if you open yourself up, under rule of law, for reciprocation in kind it’s quite likely going to happen. I will say that at that point, no more than a murderer who’s convicted and punished, you have no complaint. That’s what I say.”
Again, this was electric television.
For the record, I am not this prosecutorial in all of my interviews—only when someone says something as outlandish as that the 9/11 victims deserved it, or that bombing private homes in which little boys are asleep is a harmless crime.
As I mentioned, I’d also had some epic on-air battles with then congressman Anthony Weiner. I challenged him on his positions, and he treated me with disdain. We had some robust and widely circulated exchanges, including on The Kelly File.
In 2011, Weiner was outed for sending lewd texts, including naked pictures of himself, to random women on the Internet. I was on maternity leave with Yardley when it happened. He’d just sent me a handwritten congratulations note on her birth. Despite the contentious interviews we’d had, I felt bad for him.
I typically feel uncomfortable judging what people do in their relationships. That’s not to say we should have no moral standards as a society. But I was taught that those standards must include forgiveness; that we are all sinners. You never know what goes on in somebody’s marriage.
That’s not to excuse Weiner’s conduct. An inappropriate Internet relationship is a form of cheating. Beyond that, he had to know in his position as a US Congressman that this kind of intimate exchange with random women he’d met online was an incredibly reckless act. Weiner was nearly ruined by the scandal.
And then, an amazing thing happened: the public seemed ready to forgive him. His wife, Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman, Huma Abedin, stood by him. She clearly loved him. What’s more, she took wedding vows, was expecting his child, and wanted it to work. I think her choices helped the public look past his mistakes. But then Weiner ran for New York City mayor, and it came out that he had continued the illicit behavior even after he’d been caught and done his apology rounds and been forgiven. This was a bridge too far, and in the mayoral election he wound up getting less than 5 percent of the vote. There was only so much the public could look past. I understand that, too.
As luck would have it, I was on my next maternity leave (with Thatcher) when Weiner’s mayoral race scandal broke in 2013. Even though most people thought I would have loved to cover Weiner’s downfall, I felt relieved I didn’t have to.
Don’t get me wrong, part of me felt a smidge of satisfaction that someone who had been quite rude to me had fallen from grace. Still, I get uncomfortable with the level of zeal our society brings to the downfall of the mighty in this country—particularly when it’s due to a personal failing as opposed to a political breach.
This same reticence manifested in our coverage, or lack thereof, of the deeply troubled Canadian politician Rob Ford. We barely covered the story, even when those around us in the TV universe were leading with it night after night. That story, at its heart, was about drug addiction. It was a made-for-TV tale in some ways—the things he was doing were so outrageous. Some TV hosts openly laughed at him.
While I’ve never tried drugs, I know people who have st
ruggled with addiction, and it is far from a laughing matter. It is like having a nuclear bomb go off in your life, and your family’s lives. What we were seeing was the self-destruction of a man who was failing to conquer a disease that has burdened so many. The ratings gold the story provided simply was not worth it. When Rob Ford died of cancer in 2016, I was glad we’d never added to his public shaming.
I am not naive. I understand that public shaming is often what we do for a living in the news business. A sitting president has an affair with an intern in the Oval Office and then lies about it under oath? Of course the press is going to pounce on that. But the glee the media—and the public—seem to experience in consuming each other’s personal embarrassments is disheartening to me. I do my best to avoid these celebrations of destruction where I can. I think my viewers notice. I have received thousands of notes from fans of the show, but only one is posted on my office bulletin board, from a viewer named Linda, written in silver: “Thank you so much. Sharing news that does not create more resentment takes great style.”
When NBC’s Brian Williams had his fall from grace, we adopted the same approach. His serial exaggerations were a story, no question, but not something we needed to hammer every night. I made sure always to give voice to his explanation when we discussed it, and whenever I was asked about him publicly, I defended the belief in second chances. Did I think he could return to the evening news chair on NBC? No. But should his entire career be over? No. It wasn’t as if he’d been actively hurting people. Some seemed to express such glee that he had embarrassed himself. I’m not saying it wasn’t a story; I’m saying I hate how we forget about our subject’s humanity in reporting these stories.
