Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  So when he tried, somewhat predictably, to say it was only Rosie O’Donnell, I was prepared to fact-check him on the spot.

  “For the record,” I said, “it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.” Even Trump had to admit that was true in the moment. Then I continued: “Your Twitter account 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’?”

  Trump responded that we’ve gotten too politically correct in this country—and on that I agree with him, as do many voters. Whether that excuses his comments about women, well, that was the voters’ job to decide. My job was simply to shine a light.

  “What I say is what I say,” he continued. “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.”

  I noticed the shot but moved on, glad the exchange had gone relatively well. After that, I was relieved. I knew the hardest part of the night was over, and the rest felt like downhill skiing.

  When the whole thing was over, I was elated. I believed the debate had gone very well. It was riveting. Everyone was on their game, and the ratings the next day would confirm it. Bret, Chris, and I exchanged congratulations, and I hightailed it off the stage.

  Immediately after we wrapped, I had to do my show live from what they call Spin Alley in the convention center. At 11:00 p.m. sharp, I rushed from the debate stage to my set, perched in the middle of a swarm of reporters. During that live broadcast, with reporters wall-to-wall around him, Trump walked by my set. He yelled out, “Megyn Kelly is not nice! She is no good!” I chose not to acknowledge it.

  The media saw how angry he was, and he did not mince words in interviews that night, describing my woman question as “nasty” and “unfair.”6 I saw my fellow reporters eating it up, apparently reluctant to challenge his characterizations.

  Trump’s annoyance built from there.7 He retweeted followers, calling me “overrated,” “angry,” and a “bimbo” and he directly called me “not very good or professional!” He said I “really bombed tonight. People are going wild on twitter! Funny to watch.” Some reporters openly speculated about whether Trump himself could be sending these tweets.

  Being accustomed to politicians unhappy with their coverage, I wasn’t particularly concerned with these criticisms. They usually got over it quickly. In fact, I understood Trump’s anger. He was new to the political process, standing up there next to a bunch of political pros who had been through dozens of debates in their careers, and he didn’t know what to expect. He said repeatedly that we were “not nice” to him. No one ever promised we would be nice. Debates aren’t cocktail parties. However, all of this was new to Trump, who thought he had a good relationship with Fox News (which he does), with these moderators (which he did), and that his presence on that stage would help drive huge ratings (which it did). He felt betrayed. I get it. I don’t agree with it, but I get it.

  By the end of the primary debate process, Trump would be far more savvy. He understood that these things could be very tough, and he was more up to the task. He learned to project “I’m a winner” instead of “I’m a whiner” after the debates were over. That shift did not, however, include moving on from what happened with me.

  The next morning, at the airport in Cleveland, sitting with Abby at a café, I scrolled through my phone. Half of what I saw were great reviews and kudos. The other half were incredibly nasty messages from Trump and his supporters. He was repeatedly ripping on me in interviews and on Twitter. “Beautiful Twitter account” indeed. Holy shit, I thought. He’s really going for it.

  At that point, I figured that he’d wear himself out. I still believe it would not have been nearly as big a deal if Trump hadn’t reacted the way he had. Every one of the candidates got extremely tough questions that night. But Trump was the only one to complain. Trump’s extraordinary reaction was enough to draw millions of eyeballs to the woman question, over and over and over again. I wondered whether that was a smart tactical move on his part.

  Having been on TV for over a decade, I had seen plenty of on-air exchanges go viral on the Internet. But this was in a league of its own. It was everywhere. Everywhere. Broadcast, cable, talk radio, print, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, every online site known to man, domestically and internationally—Peru, Brazil, Italy, and beyond.

  My brother Pete texted to see how I was holding up. My sister wrote me, “Put on some Willy Wonka—and remember, you can run circles around any of these people.”

  “I have every confidence in you, honey,” my mom said. “You never met a man you couldn’t handle.”

  As soon as we arrived in New York, I headed into Fox News. I had agreed to do a pretaped interview that day with Howie Kurtz, Fox’s media watchdog, for his Sunday show. In the on-camera exchange, I told him, “I’m sure nerves were high, as they were for all of the candidates. Trump felt attacked. It wasn’t an attack. It’s okay with me that there’s some consternation. He’ll get over that, and we’ll be fine. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  Everyone in the Fox building did one of two things when they saw me: congratulated me or asked if I was doing okay. Such an odd combination of celebration and sympathy. I would get very used to it in the months to come.

  Most nights, The Kelly File is live at 9:00 p.m., but that day we pretaped it with a studio audience reacting to the debate. When I was done, it was almost 9:00. I sat at my desk in my office and flipped around the channels to see what the coverage looked like. Every channel was wall-to-wall debate coverage, with most talking about my question and Trump’s attacks on me.

  On CNN, Don Lemon was anchoring, and Trump was doing a phoner. I heard later that Trump had insisted his interview with Lemon air opposite our show at 9:00 p.m., as opposed to at 10:00 p.m., when Don usually anchors. CNN acquiesced and gave Trump a thirty-minute phoner, commercial-free. (For what it’s worth, The Kelly File crushed them in the ratings that night.)

  Lemon asked Trump, “What is it with you and Megyn Kelly?”

  “Well, I just don’t respect her as a journalist,” Trump said. “I have no respect for her. I don’t think she’s very good. She’s highly overrated. But when I came out there, what am I doing? I’m not getting paid for this. I go out there. They start saying lift up your arm if you’re . . . I didn’t know there were going to be twenty-four million people. I knew there was going to be a big crowd because I get big crowds. They call me the ratings machine. So she gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions and you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her . . . wherever. In my opinion, she was off base. And, by the way, not in my opinion—in the opinion of hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter. . . . She’s a lightweight, and I couldn’t care less about her.”

  My wherever?

  I e-mailed Irena Briganti, Fox’s top PR person.

  Did you see that? I asked.

  She had indeed.

  Fox News is very good at responding when one of its people is attacked. But we were in uncharted territory. We had to be careful. This was a front-runner in the campaign. I certainly did not want to get down into the mud with him, but I was also stunned at the tone of his attacks. And yet I don’t think I realized the magnitude of what had just happened or where those comments would take us.

  I texted Don Lemon, with whom I’m friendly: Cannot believe the latest.

  Continue taking the high road, he responded.

  I like Lemon. I enjoy his approach to the news. Some people would later give him a hard time for not calling out Trump on the blood comments in the moment. I don’t think Lemon understood the comments to be a reference to a woman’s m
enstrual cycle. There is still debate about whether that’s what Trump meant—Trump would later say he meant my nose or ears—but I was fine with how Lemon handled it.

  I was heading to the Jersey shore that night to be with Doug and my kids for the weekend. It was Friday. Getting into that car was like getting into a warm bath. I was done with the debate and the months of preparation that went into it. Bret, Chris, Sammon, Stirewalt, and I all felt great about it, and were exchanging e-mails about the strong reviews. Frank Bruni’s in the New York Times was particularly memorable. The debate was “riveting,” Bruni wrote. “It was admirable. It compels me to write a cluster of words I never imagined writing: hooray for Fox News.”8 Once again, the insult tied to the compliment.

  I was finally on my way to my family . . . my happiness . . . the heart of what I truly am.

  It was in the back of that car that everything seemed to explode. Staring at my phone, I saw the Internet lose its mind over those blood comments. And I knew, as that car sped through the dark night, phone glowing in my hand, that things would never be the same again.

  21

  Fallout

  The shocks came one after the other. Within hours of the Lemon interview, Erick Erickson disinvited Trump from a conservative gathering he was about to host. Erick Erickson! The very man I had publicly castigated for his sexist views on women was castigating a different man for his comments about me. I couldn’t believe it. I could not keep up with all the e-mails, texts, and notifications coming in, many with the hashtag #IStandWithMegyn. I felt uncomfortable. The story was growing, and I wanted it extinguished.

  The exchange was catching fire in a way I had never seen before. My head was swimming. It is truly bizarre to cover the news for a living and then to see yourself actually become the news from coast to coast and beyond. I felt like Alice through the Looking Glass. I was used to talking about politicians; all of a sudden, politicians were talking about me.1

  On Twitter, Carly Fiorina wrote,2 “Mr. Trump: There. Is. No Excuse,” adding “I stand with @megynkelly.”

  Scott Walker wrote, “There’s no excuse for Trump’s comments. . . . @MegynKelly is a tough interview. Being POTUS is tougher.”

  John Kasich, Rick Perry, George Pataki, Jeb Bush, Lindsay Graham, to name a few, weighed in with similar condemnations, and some called for Trump to drop out of the race.

  It was clear now that this story wasn’t going away anytime soon. At first, I felt gratified that, to the extent people felt the need to comment on it at all, they appeared to be saying enough is enough—that Trump should stop the nonsense. But in twenty-four hours I would feel very differently. This was the beginning of a cycle I would go through many, many times with Trump. A master at manipulating the media, he would find a way to reset the public’s perception of an event within days or even hours. The media was, of course, eager to give him the platform.

  Someone asked me later if I felt embarrassed that the nation was discussing my menstrual cycle. I didn’t. It was more like disbelief. What was happening? Every show in the nation is leading with Trump talking about my period? I mean, who the hell has a file for that one?

  Trump denied that those comments meant what many thought they meant. He said in a statement that “only a sick person” or a “deviant” would think that he was referring to menstruation—a line that would wind up the subject of considerable mockery, especially by Jimmy Fallon. He would do the same thing later after mocking Carly Fiorina’s appearance. “Look at that face!” he said on the trail.3 “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” Trump would later dismiss this as an innocent comment about her “persona.” Fiorina later addressed that at a debate, saying,4 “I think women all over the country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.” It was a mic-drop moment for her.

  I found it curious that no one was asking Trump about his retweets of people calling me a “bimbo,” which were unambiguous and continuing around this same time. Blood apparently trumps bimbo on the scale of offensive rhetoric; indeed, “bimbo” didn’t seem to carry much shock value. Trump also continued saying that I was terrible, unfair, a lightweight, and so on. People were calling it a “feud,” or a “war,” when in fact it was a one-sided offensive. I had neither baited him nor fought back. I just sat and watched, and waited for it to end.

  Looking at the constant ongoing barrage from him and the vitriol coming from so many of his supporters, I realized for the first time, He’s not stopping. I’d seen angry politicians before, but usually they wore themselves out once they got a complaint out of their system. Trump seemed to be gaining steam. Later I would return to work to find a litany of voice mails—someone had released my number on the Internet—calling me a “cunt,” “bitch,” and “fucking whore.” This wasn’t particularly enjoyable to listen to, but didn’t really upset me—again, unfortunately, it can be part of the job, as virtually anyone who upset Trump during his presidential run found out. One caller reamed me for raising the women issue at all, saying, “No one gives a damn about misogyny. This country has real problems.”

  One of the greatest ironies was that with every new comment, Trump was proving the point of my question. I had asked about how he would combat the likely Hillary narrative that he is part of the so-called war on women, a meme used rather effectively by the Democrats in 2012. With each new blow against me, I thought, She’s going to hit you with that one, too.

  Late that Friday night, I arrived at the shore and slipped into bed with Doug. The next morning, I told Doug about what had happened. He was angry about the blood comment and wanted to know what Fox was doing about it. I told him the truth: “Nothing for now.”

  What could they do? Roger was talking to Trump daily, trying to calm him down. But it wasn’t working. Many in the press questioned why Fox wasn’t hitting back hard at Trump, given Roger’s infamous love of fighting and the nature of the attacks on me. I understood Roger’s decision, however. None of us wanted a fight with Trump—what we wanted was to cover his fight with his opponents.

  It was that morning that I saw Trump’s attorney and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, Michael Cohen, getting retweeted, over and over and over again, with a message directed at me. He had retweeted a Trump supporter who said #boycottmegynkelly @realDonaldTrump we can gut her.

  Gut her.

  For the first time, I felt alarmed. Michael Cohen is the same man who had threatened Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak with the line, “What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.” At the time he was Trump’s main surrogate, his top message man, and is to this day a loyal soldier in the Trump army. Now, as tempers were already at fever pitch, he was telling his 40,000 followers to “gut” me? This went too far, and was easily the thing from Team Trump that most bothered me in the days after the debate. As if on cue, the threats skyrocketed.

  “Fox has to do something,” Doug demanded. Trump may have been polling well with white men across America, but not so much with those inside my apartment.

  I later found out that Fox was doing something. Bill Shine called Cohen directly and tried to make him understand this kind of irresponsible messaging had already led to death threats. Cohen—a frequent guest on Fox News—was not particularly moved.

  Shine, exasperated by Cohen’s indifference, tried to explain it in terms Cohen might understand: “If Megyn Kelly is killed, it’s not going to help your candidate.”

  Sean Hannity also worked behind the scenes to lower the temperature among Trump’s more prominent supporters, including some on talk radio and online who were ratcheting up the anger. He didn’t have to do it, but he had my back.

  I was growing concerned—with the threats, the misinformation, the battering ram being used on my reputation and my relationship with my viewers. I realized that my pretaped segment with Howie Kurtz was going to air Sunday morning, and it
occurred to me that I should contact him. I wanted to be sure that, given the “gut her” tweet and the amount of threats pouring in, he made it clear that my “No big deal” reaction was taped prior to the weekend’s events. Having lived under threat years before with the stalker, I didn’t want to give the impression that threats to my safety were fair game.

  Howie understood completely, and agreed to make that point.

  I went back to work that Monday and Tuesday, as previously planned. I would then start a ten-day vacation at the shore.

  When I got back to New York for my Monday-night show, things were strained around the building. So many of my colleagues were incredibly supportive, but there were also plenty who had no idea what to say to me. Was I a heroine or a victim? Or a villain? Should they high-five me or hug me—or hate me? I think it was unclear to many of them. A few were vocal Trump supporters who, like Trump himself, appeared to be somewhat angry with me.

  I toughed it out for two days, heartened that a break was coming my way. On The Kelly File, I announced that I was going on vacation: “It’s been an interesting week. A long six months, without a vacation for yours truly. . . . So I’ll be taking the next week and a half off, spending some time with my husband and my kids, trying to relax. . . . Have a great week.”

  The statement fell on deaf ears. By the time I arrived at the shore in the wee hours of the morning, Trump’s supporters were already celebrating the fiction that I had been suspended. Trump fueled the rumor with more tweets, saying I should “take another 11-day ‘unscheduled’ vacation,”5 and that my show was better without me. His Twitter brigade rejoiced.