Author: Natalie Finn / Source: E! Online
In the end, was Megyn Kellyjust not the right fit for a morning show? Not the a.m. coffee-chugging club’s cup of tea?
This week, The View‘s Abby Huntsman, like Kelly a Fox News alumna who decamped for broadcast daytime TV, suggested in an interview that Kelly might have been better served on NBC if she had offered up more of herself—especially to an audience that tends to lend its loyalty to a show based on how much it enjoys the hosts.
Onscreen chemistry also matters: if they look genuinely warm and fuzzy with each other—or in The View‘s case, intriguingly salty and stubborn—viewers tend to feel more connected to them.“Even—not to really go there—but with all Megyn Kelly is going through, I think what has hurt her is she did not allow herself to be as vulnerable as she should have and to be self-deprecating,” Huntsman told Bold TV. “And so when you do make those mistakes, people are more likely to say ‘OK, let’s forgive you this time.’ Because we know you’re a good person—because I know she is, but she’s had a harder time really showing people her real side.”
After a bumpy start in 2017, Kelly seemed to be easing into her role as host of the 9 a.m. hour of Today and part of the greater ensemble. But the clock unexpectedly ran out on her tenure last week in spectacularly polarizing fashion.
Not too long ago, Megyn Kelly was perceived as one of the few people who could bridge the gaps between an increasingly splintered viewing pool—attract female viewers with her strength and poise, conservatives with her Fox News pedigree, the moderate majority with her no-nonsense smarts and the MSNBC crowd with… well, the TV was on already anyway.
Kelly had made a name for herself as an unflappable presence at Fox News Channel. Most of her opinions came off as reliably conservative, when she shared them, but she was more than happy to ask tough questions of (or completely shut down) guests who were there to ostensibly support the network’s overarching viewpoint. She was regularly told by strangers that they hated Fox News but loved her.
“I’m conservative on some things and I’m not on other things,” Kelly said during a 2010 interview on The Howard Stern Show—proof right there that she isn’t as uptight as she could sometimes seem. When Stern, naturally, expressed disappointment that she wore pants to the studio instead of a dress, she acknowledged her network’s reputation, quipping, “Whenever you wear pants [on Fox News], you get letters from the ladies saying, ‘It’s about time.'”
She quietly divorced her first husband, Dr. Daniel Kendall, in 2006 after five years of marriage, and soon after met entrepreneur turned novelist Douglas Brunt on a blind date in Washington, D.C.—although not that blind for him, as he knew what Kelly looked like from TV.
“We started dating shortly after she acquired a stalker—bad start, I know,” Brunt relayed in a post on the Humans of New York Instagram account. “So she had security with her 24/7. Our first date went great. It was the kind of night that was clearly going to end with a kiss. But I had to kiss her in front of the security guards. It was awkward. It was like our parents were watching. The next morning she knocked on my hotel room door. She was alone. She walked into the room, and said: ‘I can do better.'”
For several months, they made it work long distance, Brunt in New York and Kelly in D.C.
“He came across as sincere,” Kelly later told The New York Times. “While we were talking, he leaned forward, really listening to what I was saying. He’s also clever and has a great sense of humor.”
“She works hard, has her life thought out, and is very rational,” Brunt told the paper. “At the same time, she’s romantic and passionate.”
In fact, she dumped him one New Year’s Eve after an almost-disastrous dog walk. They recalled to the Times that they were walking her two Shih Tzus in D.C. when one got away from Brunt and narrowly missed getting hit by a car. He apologized profusely and she, impressed by his emotional honesty, forgave him. But better yet, Fox News transferred her a week later to New York, so they could finally live in the same city.
They married in March 2008 and have three children together, sons Yates and Thatcher and daughter Yardley. Kelly rejected early on the antiquated notion that she had to choose between a flourishing career and a growing family.
A practicing lawyer for nine years before getting into the news business, Kelly was willing to get perfectly real on certain subjects.
She gained 33 pounds with her first pregnancy in 2009, she told Stern frankly, and “ballooned like a tick” after undergoing a C-section. “So a week after having the baby I look down at the scale expecting some miracle—I gained five pounds!” The weight finally started to come off, and she went on a diet to lose the last 10 pounds.
Kelly also found herself sticking up for maternity leave on the air, after a commentator called her three-month absence for the birth of Yardley, her second child, a “racket.”
“We’re populating the human race,” she declared on the afternoon show she hosted at the time, America Live. “It’s not a vacation. It’s hard, important work.”
Talking about the similarities between her former career as an attorney and her work at Fox News, she told the New York Times in 2011, “We take large amounts of information and try to tell a story in the most persuasive way, whether it’s to a jury or to an audience. Anchors and trial lawyers are both performers at heart.” The paper noted that she jumped in the car waiting to take her to work wearing skinny jeans and wryly said later, “If you want to see me in something nice, tune in between 1 and 3 p.m.”
Asked if she was enjoying her second career, unlike her first one, Kelly exclaimed, “Guilty! I really am. Before I did this, I had everything going for me on paper. A great law firm job, a doctor husband—this middle-class girl had arrived. But it was not fun.”
Revealing that she had received a kind note from by-then disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner after she had her Yardley, Kelly told USA Weekend in 2011 that she felt bad for his family. “I have been in the position, not with my current marriage, where I’ve been betrayed,” she shared. “In the beginning, the instinct is very powerful to hang on.” She also, in the course of a seemingly unrelated discussion about then Attorney General Eric Holder, told a guest on her show in 2013 that she had been cheated on.
Her ex, Dan Kendall, told the Mail Online in 2015 that he did not cheat on Kelly. He suspected who did, but out of respect for her would of course not name names.
“I believe working two jobs, the long hours of corporate law and part time news together with my long hours of medical training took a toll on our marriage,” Kendall, since remarried and a father of two, said. “I was working very hard and very long hours and we found our interests to be in different places. Let’s just say I really loved sports and she was never a big fan of ESPN. We just grew apart…It is just a matter that sometimes two personalities can clash.”
He added, “So we broke up, it was mutual. She wanted to work on things and wanted to keep it going but I realized it wasn’t going anywhere. She moved just down the street and it was very amicable—we still walked the dogs together.” They remained friends and he even appeared as a medical expert on her show in 2011, he noted.
Kendall concluded, “I have a tremendous amount of respect for Megyn and I still like her as a person. I just want what is best for her and her family.”
“He’s a good guy who I’m still friends with,” Kelly also told Howard Stern back in 2010. She was “just unhappy” in the marriage.
While she was generally known for being more of a straight shooter than some of her colleagues, her potential crossover appeal seemingly came into focus in 2015, when people who were not among dedicated Fox News viewers, or who would not have previously considered themselves Kelly fans, sat up and took notice when she pointedly asked then-candidate Donald Trumpabout nasty comments he had made about women over the years during the first Republican primary debate. She stoked the future president’s ire, withstood his “blood coming out of her wherever” attacks…
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