There was a brief period of time during which a whole lot of people on the Left were pretty supportive of Megyn Kelly, despite finding her and her rants about Santa’s intrinsic whiteness pretty deeply offensive. Why? Because when she said that she was sexually harassed by Roger Ailes, we believed her and were disgusted by him (not that we weren’t already, but still). When we heard the grotesque things Trump said about her during the 2016 election, we were horrified and disgusted by him. Frankly, I felt a little sad for her that the audience she spent her life courting not only didn’t think it was any bar to voting for him, but that they cheered him on and gleefully turned on her. Though I guess that’s what happens when you and your network have spent years turning said audience into a not-so-pretty hate machine.
As hard as it may be for someone like Kelly to understand, our assessment of “a bad thing” doesn’t depend on who the players are. On the Right, they only care about sexual assault when it’s committed by immigrants or trans people. They only care about people being falsely accused when the people potentially being falsely accused are (or are assumed to be) white male conservatives. In fact, one would not be wrong to say that they only care about anything when it’s something they believe can be used as a cudgel against a group they don’t like.
But, like most people on the Left, I suffer no cognitive dissonance while saying that what happened to Megyn Kelly was wrong. Although right now I’m kind of wondering if she believes that.
After all, she’s spent the last couple of weeks dragging Jane Doe from the Cornell Seven case and smearing her as a liar with a lawyer who she says is “out to destroy the lives of young men.”
THIS ONE.
“I'm sorry, but three weeks ...” she said on a recent broadcast of The Megyn Kelly Show. “If you were violently gang raped repeatedly over the course of an evening, do you think it would take you three weeks to call the campus police? And do you think you'd call the campus police at all?”
You know, I can’t actually say because that’s never happened to me — but maybe! Probably, in fact, because procrastination is my traditional response to anxiety, and because practically everyone I know who has ever gone to the police has ended up so traumatized by that experience that they decided to not continue pressing charges. I know at least two women who say the police messed with their heads and tried to convince them it was actually consensual. It’s not as though you report your rape and Mariska Hargitay comes riding in on a white horse to hold your hand and gently guide you through the process. I also know that there are about 225,000 untested rape kits out there, which suggests that this is not nearly as high a priority for our police as, for instance, killing unarmed Black people. So the idea of putting myself through that for nothing might not actually seem that appealing. Maybe I might think going to the school or to the campus police might be a way to baby-step the process in a way I could handle better. Quite frankly, I don’t know what I’d do and neither does anyone else.
I also know that there are women who take a long time to come to terms with the fact that they were sexually assaulted by someone they know and maybe even liked. Because everyone’s response to trauma is different and it’s not always logical. This is why Jane Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, specifically pointed out that it was a problem that the campus police were not adequately trained to help victims of sexual assault.
There are also women out there who take a decade to come forward about something like sexual harassment, and sometimes those women are Megyn Kelly.
One of the things Kelly has been harping on has been Jane Doe’s alleged text messages to one of the alleged assailants, suggesting that because she was somewhat friendly while trying to parse out what exactly had happened to her that it’s clear it was consensual because who would do that if it weren’t?
I don’t know, maybe Megyn Kelly? Who continued to work for Roger Ailes for years after he sexually harassed her early in her career?
Via ABC:
“He tried to kiss me three times [in his office], so I rejected that, and when I rejected that, he asked me when my contract was up,” Kelly, 45, said today on “Good Morning America.” “As soon as I left his office, I called a lawyer, and I did bring the matter to a supervisor at Fox News.”
“That person vouched for Roger's character, assured me that he was a good man, that he was likely just smitten and that I should try to avoid him, which I did,” said Kelly, who said harassment from Ailes, 76, stopped after she avoided him for six months. […]
“He and I had gone on to have nine years of a healthy working relationship, and so in my mind I had attributed [it] to he was interested in me, he was having a marital difficulty, perhaps he was just interested in having an extramarital affair,” Kelly said later. “I wrestled with what to do because I wasn't sure what the truth was about Roger.”
You hear that? She wrestled with what to do! She wasn’t sure what exactly had gone down or how to classify it until later, and when she complained, she was told by a supervisor that he was a “good man.”
Kelly also stated that it would have been a career “suicide mission,” which does suggest that she was, at least at one point in her life, aware that coming forward about sexual misconduct doesn’t usually work out in favor of the victim.
Kelly has also been outraged that Jane Doe has been allowed to remain anonymous in the mainstream media (after having been doxxed by Michael Tracey and right-wing creeps on X, but we repeat ourselves) and is apparently “weighing” whether or not to reveal the young woman’s identity herself. And yet, if Jane Doe had come forward publicly, there is little doubt that Kelly would have insisted she was in it for the glory and fame. In fact, she’s already suggested that Jane Doe must be reveling in hearing all of the celebs talk about how brave she is.
“She made up a lie about being gang raped and I think it probably feels very good to see all these people speaking out in her defense right now. But inside she knows what she’s doing. She knows it’s wrong. She’s going to have to reconcile it with God, who also knows the truth,” Kelly said on her show on Monday.
Oh, I’m sure it feels just wonderful. I’m sure she’s really focused on that and not, you know, the absolute psychos that have been harassing her ever since her name was publicly revealed.
Kelly’s theory, of course, is that Jane Doe did all of those things totally consensually — possibly coerced only by Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast — and then felt horribly ashamed afterwards because she knew it was wrong, and then even more embarrassed when it came out and she got barred from parties, and that was when she decided to report it as a rape. But not really, because she only reported an entirely consensual situation in which she had a fabulous time (apparently). You know, because people are always reporting their consensual drug use and gang bangs to the police. Then, two years later, for no apparent reason, out of nowhere, she decided to file a civil suit and publicize the entirely consensual gang bang to the entire world, but claim it was non-consensual.
(I do not believe Kelly acknowledges the text from the frat boy who apologized to her “for how things went down the other night,” whom she told that “90 percent of what happened was not consensual” and who lied to her about how the other men ended up in the room.)
Does that sound like a thing that happens outside of the fever dreams of right-wing Republicans who insist upon pretending that everyone hates consensual sex as much as they do? It really does not.
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Kelly likes to talk about how she was “radicalized” by losing her morning show at NBC after defending Blackface Halloween costumes following a scandal in which Countess Luann De Lesseps of Real Housewives of New York went to a costume party dressed as Diana Ross, covered in bronzer (which she claimed was her usual amount of bronzer when she apologized for the incident) and wearing an enormous afro wig.
“When I was at Fox and then for that year at NBC, I was more in the center. I was like definitely center-right. Now I think I'm pretty conservative. I mean, I just am now. I mean, the earth has shifted such that I think I have to say, yes, by today's standards, you'd call me conservative. But that's thanks to them. What they did to me, they were vicious. They're complete assholes. Their woke ideology completely radicalized me against them. And I love that. It empowered me in a way that allowed me to see the truth about them. That was very helpful to me. I wouldn't undo it if I could because it really helped me understand who I was dealing with over there.”
For the record, white people learned that Blackface was offensive and racist several decades prior to 2018, which would be why the 1980 Neil Diamond version of The Jazz Singer was a tad different than the 1927 Al Jolson version of The Jazz Singer.
This new, freshly radicalized Megyn Kelly has since put a lot of effort into courting the kind of misogynistic incels who absolutely despised her when she was attacking Trump in 2016 and hosting entire shows featuring the women who accused him of sexual assault. She herself described being constantly attacked by Breitbart, which she said “tried to destroy” her for the crime of having asked Trump a question about the way he talks about women he doesn’t like. I honestly suspect that her attacks on Jane Doe are her way of “bending the knee” to them, her apology to them for having come forward about sexual harassment. It’s her way of assuring them that she is one of them now, that she would never do something like that today. This feels especially evident in the way she has suggested that Jane Doe was down for a drug-fueled gang bang because she was ashamed of her “beefy arms” and “cankles.”
“No one will even consider the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on with four men total, not seven, and enjoyed it because — I'm just going to be honest, she's not the most attractive gal. She's extremely beefy in her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes. Admired, wanted, some women even foolishly say loved by these guys at Cornell. But this is probably a first for her. She's probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn't grow up the incredibly beautiful one.”
Oh, sure, because the first thing you want to do when you are insecure about your body is to get naked in front of a large group of men, have consensual sex with them and then anonymously accuse them of rape. This is definitely a scenario that makes sense to people who have not planned on shooting up a shopping mall in order to get revenge on all of the women who have rejected them. It’s definitely not the new “she wasn’t hot enough to rape” bullshit.
Though, to be fair, Megyn has also claimed that being unattractive also causes people to vote for Democrats.
BLESS HER HEART.
Can you imagine what Megyn Kelly now would say about Megyn Kelly then? She’d probably say that she was only reporting it to jump on a bandwagon with Gretchen Carlson, who was mad at Ailes for demoting her and not renewing her contract. That she was also trying to jump on the #MeToo bandwagon for clout. That she only did it so that she could become the most objectionable human being that Charlize Theron has ever played in a movie (including Aileen Wuornos). That she was asking for it, or that she shouldn’t have been trying to take a man’s job, anyway. That she was taking a small infraction and using it to ruin “a good man’s” life.
I don’t think there’s a thing that Megyn Kelly could have done to make Megyn Kelly believe her story, and I’m certain that if Megyn Kelly had been on the case at that time, it is likely that Megyn Kelly would have been fully canceled and excommunicated by the Right, never to show her face in those parts again.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Another thing, you never really know how you will react to trauma until you are traumatized.
I have nothing good to say. And a lot to say that will get me perma-banned.
Going to go pet my wienerdog and pretend humanity doesn't deserve to go extinct.