Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  Trump ultimately agreed to sit with me for my Fox Broadcast special. As we waited for him to arrive to the interview in a conference room at Trump Tower, you could hear a pin drop. The lighting guy told me he’d been so nervous he couldn’t sleep the night before. I think everyone realized this could go badly. In fact, it went very well.

  I pressed Trump on his temperament. On the responsibility that comes with power. I asked him about his attacks on Heidi Cruz, John McCain, and others. About whether he would own up to the mistakes he’d made. I refused to let him downplay his disparaging language about women. I asked him how American parents could teach their kids not to bully, tease, taunt, and name-call when the GOP front-runner does all of those things. I asked him if he had ever been bullied or emotionally wounded. I found his answers fascinating.

  He said he really had been angry all those months. He admitted—almost too easily—that he’d never really boycotted The Kelly File despite his insistence that his fans do so. He claimed not to know he had retweeted messages calling me a bimbo. It wasn’t a cage match. It was a chess move in a complex game—not a policy interview, but an interview focused on Trump the man that would publicly end this months-long spectacle.

  Trump was pleased with how it turned out, and seemed to finally recognize that it was time for our story to come to a close. He tweeted out, “And they all lived happily ever after!” Sure enough, he stopped his relentless attacks.

  Some critics were disappointed. They wanted me to take down Trump. But that was never my goal, or my job. Others wanted to see me play the victim, to hold him to account for what he’d done to me. They didn’t know me at all.

  By this point in my career, while I didn’t enjoy the media attacks, I was largely able to dismiss them. My feelings about them had matured considerably. I now generally feel that they can only help me. Sometimes the media builds a figure up too much. When that scale gets tipped too far in favor of such a person, there’s something delightful about pulling them back. I believe that if the country needs to knock you down a little, it’s probably best to let them. It lets some steam out of the pressure cooker. And more humility is always good.

  Many people assumed I enjoyed my Year of Trump. Over and over I was asked about how great it had surely been for me. Folks saw the Vanity Fair cover and increased name recognition and assumed it was all rainbows and unicorns. In their defense, I did not say much publicly about what it had actually been like. But some thoughtful reporters (and my friends and family) knew enough to recognize that this had been far from a glorious time.

  One acquaintance Doug and I saw at an event in May said it perfectly, “I’m sure this has been a hard year for you both; what a tough space to occupy.” That’s exactly it—a tough space to occupy, straddling the world of being the storyteller and being the story. Like Cecilia in the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo, who somehow jumped into the movie screen and was stunned to find herself a part of the plot, as opposed to a mere observer of it.

  In the end, the notion that I had it in for Trump was never more than a fiction—one that he created and the media perpetuated, but a fiction nonetheless. Some in the media held me up as a Trump foil, and Trump painted me as a nemesis, but I never wanted that, nor participated in it.

  Some described me as “fearless” throughout these events. But I wasn’t. I was fearful at times—for my safety and that of my family. For what the attacks might mean to my career, my relationship with my viewers, and some of my professional relationships. And yet I knew I had a job to do. And doing it felt empowering. In showing up at Trump Tower that day and later interviewing him for my special, I was taking control of my life, refusing to accept the status quo. Fear did come, but so did courage. If you can muster courage in the face of fear, you become more confident. You become tougher.

  That doesn’t mean being emotionless. Clearly I cry sometimes. I am human. But I also know how to play hurt. I have worries, and insecurities, just like anyone else. And yet I push through all of that in my quest to settle for more.

  And “more” can come in surprising packages. As challenging as this year has been, it’s also allowed me to do all the things so beautifully laid out in those John Denver lyrics my dad loved so much: to laugh, cry, and sing. Laughs in some of the darkest moments, thanks to my mom’s sense of humor ingrained in me from birth . . . occasional tears when my own humanity would not be denied . . . and bouts of fear, courage, and eventually growth that have helped to make my life sing.

  “How have you been dealing with it?” people kept asking as the Trump drama rolled on, month after month. “Well,” I told them, “I’ve got a great husband, beautiful children, and supportive family members, friends, and co-workers. And I’ve had a lifetime of training.”

  Difficulty comes to everyone, and in far greater measure than I have experienced. My situation was temporary—a stressor, a distraction, but nothing compared to real suffering. The challenge of my Year of Trump was more about the folly of human interaction. And on that score, I did gain some perspective. Everyone gets knocked down in life. If we put ourselves out there at all, we deal with rejection, being hated, being bullied. It’s universal. You learn to handle it, incident by incident. You toughen up and learn how to navigate the system.

  Could twenty-two-year-old me have handled the indignities of the Trump fiasco—dealt with a leading presidential candidate talking about her bleeding, calling her a bimbo, a lightweight, a liar, crazy, sick, called for a boycott against her, and employed an attorney who encouraged 40,000 people to “gut” her—the way forty-five-year-old me did? Probably not. Some of my resilience was baked in by my parents, but most has come from practice—in my law job, my TV job, my life as an American woman.

  Adversity is an opportunity, and one that has allowed me to flourish. It has made me stronger, my skin a little thicker. And as with any turmoil in your life, none of it is for nothing if you survive it and take stock. Imagine if I’d had no conflict prior to this. If I’d had no practice in how to shore myself up. If I’d only existed in my “safe space” with my “trigger warnings,” I’d have had no means of coping.

  This is why the Cupcake Nation mentality—“Everyone’s a winner!”—is so dangerous. When we try to protect the young from any vaguely uncomfortable ideas or encounters, we do them a grave disservice. Being tested by different viewpoints in my life, being sometimes offended or occasionally hurt, or even targeted, is a big part of what prepared me for the challenges I’ve faced in my career—especially this past year. I had done the grueling sit-ups and my core was strong. I could withstand some gut punches.

  Experience gives you a folder in which to put a new upset: Ah, yes, I’m being called a bimbo by the likely Republican nominee. I will file that with my bouts with workplace sexism. I’m being bullied, and people are calling me names? It’s a magnified version of seventh grade. My safety is in danger because I did my job? I’ve been here too. It’s like functioning when you’re sick. You’d rather feel your best, but coughing and sneezing will not stop you from showing up. You do what makes you you, like being with your family and taking care of yourself and meeting your responsibilities, and you do it relentlessly until the crisis has passed. I’ve done this before, I survived, and so I know I can survive this too.

  One day when I was working as a young associate for Bickel & Brewer in Chicago I took a walk outside with my boss, Bill Brewer. We had a talk about dealing with stress, and he told me something I draw on to this day in times of trouble: “Remember who you are.” It sounds amorphous, but when something stressful happens to me, I often remind myself: “Remember who you are.”

  In other words: What defines you? Is it this latest stressor, or is it who you are as a person? Your relationships with your spouse, mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother, friend? Your principles? Will those things be around even if this situation ends badly? Will you still be you? Who is that? Are you on the line? If not, then it can’t be that bad. “Remember who you ar
e” is the rip cord that releases me from almost any dark situation, because it reminds me that what I really value is almost never at stake.

  When things were at their worst in my legal career, when I was toiling away at the office, calling my own voice mail (twice), and hoping to break a bone on the Kennedy Expressway so I could rest for a while, I was a stranger to myself. I had lost my joy, the essence of who I was. That was how I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I needed a change. That things could not continue as they were. Likewise, as stressful and maddening and relentless as the situation with Trump became, it was only in that moment of powerless resignation that this odd reality finally affected my sense of self. That was when I knew, once and for all, I had to act.

  There is no historical precedent for Trump, or for how this election played out. But there is plenty of precedent in my own life for going through difficulty and coming out the other side a little stronger. And unlike the other rough eras to date—being bullied, losing my father, getting divorced—I am coming out of this one with a beautiful, healthy family, work I love, and colleagues and friends I adore. Most of all, I’m coming out of it having remembered who I am, as a person . . . woman . . . mother . . . wife . . . daughter . . . sister . . . friend . . . and professional.

  Within hours of Trump’s becoming the presumptive Republican nominee in May 2016, Hillary Clinton and groups supporting her released several attack ads showing moments in the Trump campaign in which he had behaved outrageously, especially toward women. Quotes about or pictures of me appeared in many of them.1

  Watching these ads, I was struck again by how surreal this year had been, how much less fun it is to be the news than to cover it. And it occurred to me that this was exactly what my debate question foretold: his words about women being used against him in the general election. It had been, in other words, an important and prescient question. I knew a year earlier that this exact montage was coming; I just never imagined that I would end up in it.

  24

  Paying it Forward

  By July 2016, things had calmed down a bit in my life. Trump had stopped the nonsense. He and Hillary Clinton had secured their parties’ respective nominations. And I was getting ready for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. And then another national news story began to unfold in my life: Roger Ailes was sued for sexual harassment. The lawsuit was filed by Gretchen Carlson, an anchor whom Fox had just fired. Most of us had never seen such a complaint before, because our Fox contracts require us to arbitrate disputes in a private forum, so public lawsuits against the boss were unheard of. The majority of my colleagues dismissed the allegations as those of a disgruntled employee. But I had a different reaction. The story sounded very familiar to me, because it had happened to me years earlier.

  It started in the summer of 2005, when I was called up to New York—shortly after Brit Hume had told me I’d “captured the attention of Mr. Ailes.” I had been with the company for just under a year—I was still a neophyte in the DC Bureau, working the 5:00 a.m. shift and plenty of weekends. By this point, I had figured out that Roger was not a politically correct guy—he would often make off-color jokes or comments about people, politics—pretty much any subject. (This was not a secret in the industry—Roger was praised publicly by many writers who found his provocative style amusing). At times his humor could be over the top, but it didn’t bother me much—I’d worked in rough-and-tumble office settings before and had never been one to word-police my colleagues. However, Roger began pushing the limits well beyond humor; beyond anything I’d experienced, introducing explicit sexual innuendo into our conversations. At first it was just a comment here or there. But over the next six months, the remarks would get more frequent, and more direct, and then he made physical advances toward me.

  As with others I have since learned about, there was a pattern to his behavior. I would be called into Roger’s office, he would shut the door, and over the next hour or two, he would engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with me—veering between obviously inappropriate sexually charged comments (e.g., about the “very sexy bras” I must have and how he’d like to see me in them) and legitimate professional advice. This is part of what made it so complicated—it wasn’t all a come-on—he also gave helpful work-related counsel, such as his suggestion about showing the audience my real self. But there would always be a stinger—and they got more explicit and disturbing over time. I kept a record of Roger’s behavior, and have since shared the facts with those who investigated the case against him. I see no point in making all of the details public, but suffice it to say, he made sexual comments to me, offers of professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors, and, eventually, physical attempts to be with me—every single one of which I rejected.

  I tried to laugh off the inappropriate comments, or pretend not to understand them, or to redirect the conversation to something work related, but I was deeply concerned. It was an upsetting, impossible dynamic. Here was this man, my boss, on the cover of industry magazines as “The Most Powerful Man in News.” A man whose good opinion I desperately wanted, who could make or break my budding television career. I was beyond happy to be working there—I had finally achieved my dream. The last thing I wanted was this kind of monkey wrench thrown into our relationship. I wanted him to like me—professionally—and for him to help develop my career based only on my work performance. But he was trying to change the stakes for my advancement, and when that realization became inescapable, I felt a surge of panic.

  Early on, I was still hoping it would end without confrontation. After all, I was in DC and only got up to New York every month or so. Perhaps he’ll lose interest, I thought. Perhaps he’ll get the hint. I was also bewildered that he would take such risks with someone he barely knew. I am an attorney. How could he be so reckless? Surely, I figured, he would eventually knock it off.

  But in January 2006, Roger called me up to New York and we had a shocking exchange. I was nervous about going into his office, concerned he might start in again. Sure enough, he did. And then he crossed a new line—trying to grab me repeatedly and kiss me on the lips. I dodged the first two attempts, pushed him away, and immediately went to leave. His office was large and it took me a beat to get to the door, which was closed. As I walked away from him, he followed me and asked me an ominous question: “When is your contract up?” And then, for the third time, he tried to kiss me. I dodged him again and walked out—upset, rattled, and angry.

  There was no more trying to deny his intentions. I knew I had a very real problem on my hands. Earlier, Roger had made sure I knew the stakes, telling me: “I don’t like to fight, but when I do, I fight to kill.” The message could not have been clearer: If you tell anyone, I will destroy you. He easily could have. He was merciless to his enemies, and Roger called all the shots at Fox. He had set up the management such that everyone was completely devoted to him. Loyalty was prized above everything—it was a prerequisite of working for him. It was well known that those who crossed him would soon be at the receiving end of planted hit pieces in the press. Look at what happened to Paula Zahn—he publicly humiliated her, he sued her, he tried to end her career—just for wanting to go to CNN. And she was established; she had power. But Roger had more, and was not afraid to use it. He was well liked by most in the building and well connected to everyone in the industry. And me? I wasn’t connected at all. And I loved my job. And didn’t want to lose it.

  I left Roger’s office that day and went directly to La Guardia Airport to catch the shuttle home. I hadn’t even walked in before I called Willis Goldsmith, then the partner in charge of Jones Day’s employment law practice, who agreed to represent me. I paced back and forth outside the terminal as he walked me through my options, most of which I already knew, and none of which was ideal. I realized Roger had crossed a line, but I had handled it without doing anything. I didn’t want to sue. I didn’t want to blow this up. Like most sexual harassment targets, I just wanted it to stop. I felt better
having a lawyer in case Roger retaliated against me for rejecting him, but I knew the reality of the situation: if I caused a stink, my career would likely be over. Sure, they might investigate, but I felt certain there was no way they would get rid of him, and I would be left on the wrong side of the one man who had power at Fox. I’d get labeled a troublemaker, someone who is overly sensitive—all the things we too often hear about women who don’t tolerate harassment. I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted to do my job.

  At the time, I wondered if I was the first or only target of Roger’s advances. He was so brazen about it, I had the distinct feeling he’d done it before. I wrestled with the idea of keeping quiet. On the one hand, what if I said nothing and he did this to someone else? On the other hand, this was not the first time a male superior had come on to me, and I had no proof that Roger was a serial harasser. I tried to raise the issue with a female anchor who had been there longer than I had, to see if it had ever happened to her. She said she and Roger had always had a strictly professional relationship. I shared some of the details with my officemate Major Garrett, who was stunned and had never heard of Roger behaving that way.

  And then, after much soul-searching, I decided I needed to bring the matter to a supervisor, which I did. That person—whom I have no wish to ensnare in a press melee by naming here—vouched for Roger’s character, suggested he was likely just smitten, and recommended that I try to avoid him (which I hadn’t realized was actually an option). To this day, I don’t know whether this person pressed the matter further up the line at Fox, though no one ever contacted me. I figured I had managed to avoid compromising myself, and if I could steer clear of Roger for a while and get him to leave me alone, we could pretend the whole thing never happened. And I could get back to doing what I really wanted to do: reporting the news.