by Megyn Kelly
Fuck off you slut, I will beat you up so bad I will force you to support trump you slut.
YOU BITCH! . . . [A] twisted Bitch!!
This whore @megynkelly will get hers sooner or later. Media slut, biased unfair and no professionalism. Bitch.
[T]he bitch from Rupert Murdoch News? No thanks #cunt
You suck and you’re a hack . . . you’re not all that, you LOSE, Trump WINS.
You really need to stop bashing Trump. You must be a democrat or a liberal. Don’t watch your show anymore . . . won’t watch it again until they fire you.
I could go on.
What confused me was that by this point, Trump was winning the race for the nomination. He had vanquished everyone but Ted Cruz, who was at least as disliked by Republicans as Trump was and way behind in the delegate count. The prospect of Trump as the nominee was getting more and more likely, and yet he maintained his focus on me. If winning couldn’t distract him from coming after me, would anything? This will keep going until he chooses to stop or he loses, I thought. But he wasn’t stopping, and he wasn’t losing. That meant I likely had months—or even months plus eight years—more of this.
Over and over I thought surely things had gotten as absurd as they would get, only to be proven wrong. One day my mom told me a strange man had contacted her, trying to dig up dirt on me. Two friends of mine reached out, saying much the same. Was it a tabloid? A private investigator? Was I in this race, or a journalist covering it? The Trump army seemed not to care.
Two weeks later, on March 21, Fox News was supposed to have a Republican debate in Salt Lake City. Trump decided not to come. “We’ve had enough debates,” he said. It got canceled. Frankly, I was relieved. I didn’t want to deal with the nonsense again.
We flew to Florida for a Disney vacation—our family, and our security guard. Yes, we took an armed guard to the Magic Kingdom. More guns, more guards. My Year of Trump.
“Why is Mike here in Disney?” our kids asked. We’d all seen a lot of Mike that year.
What do you say to your children when they ask you that question? We didn’t want to scare them, especially given Yardley’s existing concern.
“He’s here to help us, honey,” I said. I think my kids were a little confused about how he could be helping us by standing next to us on line for It’s a Small World, but luckily they didn’t press the question. We did have a couple of nasty encounters, but nothing violent.
Worrying about physical harm at Disney World was definitely new territory for me and Doug. We kept thinking we’d encountered the darkest moment, only to find a new one right behind it—from strangers at our house to security at Disney to our four-year-old daughter asking what the word bimbo means. But the lowest point for me was something much quieter.
The Fox PR folks and I had spent many late nights in the office, watching the tweets roll in, staying steady at the helm, refusing to respond. But when Trump started up again in March out of nowhere after his Florida win, Irena Briganti was not pleased. She told me she believed that he had crossed a line. She felt it had become abusive, and she issued a statement defending me and calling Trump’s “vitriolic attacks . . . his extreme, sick obsession with [me] . . . beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land.”
“Irena,” I said to her, “this is just my new reality. I’ve come to accept it.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I heard the resignation in them—the defeat. When I got home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d said: “This is just my new reality.” That doesn’t sound like me, I thought. I sound like a sad little martyr. Biding my time until things improved was one thing; pathetically resigning myself to the never-ending antics of a bully was another.
And that, right there, was the sound of me hitting bottom.
Because that wasn’t me. My commitment to myself is to settle for more. Yet here I was, ready to accept a life of stress and attempted bullying that could go on for years. A life that acquiesced to being what Maureen Dowd described in a column as “Donald Trump’s chew toy.”8 In that passive, resigned stance, I didn’t recognize myself. My low point didn’t come from the threats or the hate. It wasn’t the shots at my credibility or the lame insult of “crazy.” It was the moment when I no longer felt I was being true to who I was, to the person I’d worked so hard to become ever since that late night in Chicago, watching Oprah.
I knew where the feeling of resignation came from, of course. The previous nine months had taken their toll. The security scares, the harassment, the threats, the guards, the pressure at work and on the air—it was all-consuming. I’d long since stopped being able to find any kind of humor in this mess. Laughter wasn’t a coping tool, because this wasn’t funny. It was deeply unsettling, and appeared to be never-ending.
And in that moment I knew, once and for all, that I must put a stop to this. Roger had tried. Hannity had tried. Bill Shine had tried. Time had passed. Trump wasn’t stopping. And I was done sitting back and taking it. Way back in seventh grade, I’d made a promise to myself not to tolerate bullies. Now I had to honor it. I would take control of my own life. I would get back to a normal state of affairs, one where I was reporting the story, not part of it.
“You can’t respond to irrational behavior rationally,” my mother always says. Trump has an irrational love of controversy, of acrimony. He clearly liked the idea of our “fight,” of the drama. He enjoyed it as a storyline, and if it were up to him, I believe he would have kept it going and going. Which meant it would be up to me to write the two of us an ending.
Then I saw an answer staring me in the face. I knew he wouldn’t come on The Kelly File, but I was preparing for my Fox Broadcasting Special, which was by its nature a more casual, less aggressive venue. Trump would be a natural lead interview—he had already done Barbara Walters’s 10 Most Fascinating People series three times. (“A record!” he once told me.) Talking to him face-to-face could reestablish a sane relationship. If my year of death threats was a highway, that sit-down looked distinctly like an off-ramp.
The question was: Would he do it? I thought he might. He was inches away from securing the nomination, but he was looking at a possible contested convention and a bare-knuckled general election. And he hadn’t spoken one word to the 9:00 p.m. host on Fox News in nine months, which he had to see as a liability. My ratings were stronger than ever. His calls for a boycott hadn’t made a dent. Millions of women and independents—two groups Trump needed badly—watch The Kelly File.
So there were good reasons on both sides for the meeting.
I reached out to him through two different people and asked for a meeting.
First he said no. And then he said yes.
23
The Trump Tower Accords
The morning of the meeting I woke up around 7:00 a.m., poured myself a cup of coffee, and got Yates and Yards off to school. Normally at home I am happy, and certainly when I am around Thatcher. But that day I was anxious. I did not know what to expect. I believed, sitting face-to-face, Trump would be cordial. My goal was simple—to put a stop to his behavior and remove myself as a storyline from the 2016 election. If I could also secure an interview, great.
Chris and Vincenza came over to help me get on my hair and makeup. Typically, when they get me ready at my house, it’s a lighthearted hour. We play music, drink coffee, tell stories, and laugh with the kids. That day we didn’t speak much at all. They knew I was preoccupied.
“Do you want me to keep it natural,” Vincenza asked, “since it’s daytime?”
“No,” I said. “I need my game face on.”
I went in my bedroom and put on my black Gucci sheath dress with a belt. A pair of black pumps, and I was ready to go.
Thatcher was feeling sad about my leaving that day, saying, “Mommy, don’t go. Mommy, stay here.”
While those moments usually kill me, I was in an entirely different place that morning.
“Thatch, Mom’s gotta go,
” I said, “I’ll see you later. I love you.”
I kissed him on the head, took a deep breath, and walked out, with the gals waving and blowing kisses at me as they packed up their gear.
Doug insisted on coming along in the car, and I didn’t object. We planned on getting lunch together after, and I knew I would be glad to have him there to debrief when it was over.
Many people offered to go into the meeting with me: Doug, Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade (who had successfully brokered the meeting), and Bill Geddie, who was producing the Fox Broadcast special. But it was clear to me I needed to do this by myself. Just me and Trump. No one to distract us, no one to screw it up. I think they all wanted to protect me somehow. But I needed no protection.
The texts from the few people who knew what was about to happen came in:
This is like waiting for the kickoff in the Super Bowl! wrote one friend.
I have heart palpitations right now, texted Janice Dean. Sending all my love and energy to you.”
We got there right at 11:00 a.m.
As I got out of the car, Doug said, “Babe, when you get in there, just pretend it’s your desk and your studio.” He knows how the anchor desk makes me feel.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and closed the door.
The newspapers the next day would say that I entered the building “incognito.”
Not true. I was wearing my black dress with a black coat on top of it—with no hat, wig, or sunglasses, as fun as that would have been.
I entered on the residence side of the building. The doorman opened the door for me. His eyes grew to the size of silver dollars when he recognized me, now just twenty stories away from Trump.
“Hello!” he said warmly. “Wow! Good to see you!”
Trump’s security guard, Keith, a former NYPD detective, was waiting in the lobby for me. He gave me a nice greeting and said, “Right this way.” We walked together to the elevator, got in, and Keith directed the elevator operator where to go.
When I walked into his office, Trump was sitting behind his desk, smiling. He got up immediately and came around to greet me. I moved in for a handshake, but he held out his arms for a hug, and the next thing I knew, we were hugging hello.
We are hugging, I thought. Donald Trump is hugging me and I am hugging him.
There was a part of me that felt like I was betraying myself by hugging this man who had insulted me so publicly and had created such security and privacy concerns for me and my family over the past nine months. But it felt like a kind gesture on his part—an effort to say, if not “I’m sorry,” perhaps “Let’s move on,” which was what I was there for.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, how are you?” he responded.
“I’m good, how are you?”
“I’m good too. Proud of you in a certain way. Please, sit down.”
This was going well so far.
Wait—proud of me?
I sat down in the chair across from Trump’s desk. His office is large and spectacular. Huge windows wrap around two of the four walls, overlooking Central Park and Fifth Avenue and the high-end shops below. The walls were lined with memorabilia and photos of himself with other celebrities. On his desk were stacks of magazines with him on the cover: People, Time, and about a dozen others, with several copies of each one per stack.
I told him that I had felt a little nervous, coming over.
Why did I say that? Radical honesty. Damn.
“Don’t be nervous!” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
And we were off. The conversation was off the record, and I will respect that here, but suffice it to say that we had a friendly talk about the race so far and in general the dynamic between us. We did not discuss the specifics of his antics toward me. I had zero trust in him. I had known only his erratic, volatile behavior for months. And yet at no point did it get tense. In fact, to a fly on the wall we might have sounded like friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. With total detachment, we chatted as any reporter and candidate would. I felt no anger toward him, only confusion. How could he be so affable, given the level of anger he’d sustained for so long? I tried to reconcile the person in front of me with the person I’d seen on Twitter—one warm and kind; the other—very different. They didn’t seem to match.
I tried not to let the strangeness of the moment distract me; I was laser-focused on the mission—get back to normalcy, personally and professionally. For months on end, Trump had been everywhere around me: night after night, on for the full hour with Greta or Hannity . . . on with O’Reilly on virtually any night he attacked me. He was the GOP front-runner—of course he was going to be on TV—but at times the pure saturation got tiring. Once he went on Hannity and criticized me, and I cluelessly drove our viewers to the interview: “Don’t miss Donald Trump coming up on Hannity!” Perhaps that best conveys the professional oddity of my Year of Trump: he went after me—in an interview I promoted.
After we’d been talking for a bit, Trump brought in his son Eric, who was also friendly. Then he called for Ivanka and Melania to come and meet me, but they weren’t in the building. He did get Ivanka on the phone, and we had a lovely exchange. I like her a lot—she and his other children reflect well on Trump. Before it was over, I asked Trump for an interview for my upcoming Fox Broadcast special, and he seemed agreeable, but did not give me a date.
As the meeting wound down, I felt relief, like I’d set down something heavy I’d been carrying for most of the year. Sitting at Trump Tower having a conversation with Trump felt strange, but not totally insincere. There was kindness between us in the moment. Distance, too, but kindness. I felt a bit like a hostage whose hostage taker was seeing her as a human being for the very first time—who needed to believe that he would let her go.
As I got up to go, Trump asked me for my cell phone number.
I hesitated.
“You’re not going to use it for evil, are you?” I said.
“No! No!” he said. “I promise!”
“You’re not going to ‘Lindsay Graham’ me, are you?” I asked him—a reference to the moment Trump publicly disclosed Senator Graham’s personal cell phone number after Graham criticized him in the early primary season.
“No, no, don’t worry!” he said. “Everyone’s afraid to give me their cell phones after that!”
“Of course they are,” I said.
We laughed. I gave him the number.
Trump suggested that we take a picture together. I said yes. It felt historical to me somehow. It wasn’t exactly Reagan-Gorbachev in Reykjavik, but it belonged in a time capsule for 2016.
Later I studied the picture on my phone. In it, Trump has a big smile and is flashing a thumbs-up—his standard pose. His arm is around me, and mine is around him. And yet we look like two people in very different places.
Despite his nine-month rage against me, Trump seems to have immediately let it go, if it was ever real to begin with. His smile appears completely authentic. He had bigger things to worry about: a pressing presidential campaign, and a business to run. I, on the other hand, am smiling, but it’s a forced smile. I look rather like a person who’s been through some sort of trauma and is waiting for the Coast Guard helicopter.
When I walked out of the office, a group of people had gathered—about seven or eight of them—clearly staffers for Trump. The only face I recognized was that of Michael Cohen, who had retweeted “Gut her” after the August debate. That tweet, more than any other, really bothered me. It was so visceral.
He shot me a somewhat cold look.
“Good to see you,” I said.
“You too,” he said, and at the sound of his voice, my skin crawled a bit.
He loves his boss, I told myself. That counts for something.
Trump walked me to the door of his outer-office suite. We shook hands good-bye, and I walked out with Keith.
When I left the building, Doug was out front in the SUV.
“How did it go?” Doug ask
ed. “It must have gone great for you to be in there that long.”
“It did,” I said. “It went brilliantly.”
I looked at my iPhone. It was lit up: text messages, Twitter notifications, voice mails. The news had broken of our meeting while I was inside. A producer from MSNBC had apparently seen me enter Trump Tower, and the Internet was going crazy. So was my office. I hadn’t told any of the management at Fox—including Roger—that I was going to this meeting, and they knew nothing about it in advance. Some later reported that Roger orchestrated the meeting; the truth is, he knew nothing about it. Roger was none too pleased that he found out from MSNBC.
But I didn’t care. Having the meeting take place at all, and then go well, had been too important to me to do anything that might screw it up. I had hoped to get in and out unseen and to be the first to tell Roger about it, but the risk that someone else might break the news was worth it if I could be sure the meeting took place without anyone getting too much in my head or in Trump’s in advance. I was glad I’d kept it quiet. And the bottom line was: it worked.
I was out of the shark tank.
Not long after my meeting with Trump, Doug and I were at our favorite restaurant when we overheard the women next to us talking about me. One of them asked the other, not realizing I was next to her, “Why would she meet with him? That Megyn Kelly! What could she have been thinking?” Why wouldn’t I meet with him? I thought. I host a news show and he’s the Republican nominee. Am I supposed to let his behavior prevent me from doing my job?
I mean, I understood the objections. While many Trump fans would later tell me they appreciated my reaching out to him, some who didn’t like Trump wanted me to keep the “battle” going, because they believed it was hurting his campaign—in particular, his numbers with women. I think some also enjoyed the gladiatorial nature of it, and so they delighted in every flare-up. A few people felt that by asking for a meeting, or an interview, I “caved.”
The way I see it, I rose. I made a decision to change the story, to restore my proper place in this election, and I followed through. I was not a scorned lover, intent on making a man bow to me. I was a reporter trying to cover a presidential candidate. The nature of that relationship is one of pursuit.
