The Rise And Fall Of Megyn Kelly's Career Has Been A Sight To See

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Megyn Kelly is one of the TV names you recognize, even if you've never sat through a full segment. She first became a fixture at Fox News, where her courtroom-style interviewing made her a star. In 2017, she left Fox after 12 years and headed to NBC with a massive deal and a daytime show to broaden her appeal beyond partisan cable news. After that chapter imploded, Kelly reemerged as the boss of her own megaphone on "The Megyn Kelly Show."

On the show, she's described the shift from network TV to working for herself as a complete 180, saying she can now do the school run and still be home for dinner. In 2017, she told Insider, "I regret a lot of what I've said. You're gonna be on the air several hours a week, live television, you're gonna say stupid s***. That's just the reality, you know?. So, yeah, there's a lot I'd like to go back and say differently."

Regardless, the very traits that made Kelly successful also left a trail of controversies that eventually narrowed her runway in mainstream TV. She's undeniably built a lavish lifestyle on the climb up. However, the comeback she's selling now reads like a softer version of a downfall — from a Fox News anchor who once helped set the day's agenda to a figure whose biggest moments increasingly land as podcast clips, chopped up and floating around X.

Kelly did not set out to be a television star. Before media, she spent about a decade as a lawyer in Chicago and was on a track that could have ended in a partnership. By all accounts, she had achieved the life she worked hard for. In her memoir "Settle for More," though, she described feeling the cost of that success more than the payoff. "I hated the anger. Hated the hours. Hated what I'd become," she wrote (via Forbes).

In 2004, she walked away from law and joined Fox News as a Washington, D.C., correspondent. The network kept putting her in bigger spots as it grew more confident in her on-air presence. By 2010, she was hosting a two-hour afternoon show, "America Live".

Fox's daytime viewership rose that year, with Insider reporting a 20% jump. By 2013, Fox moved her into primetime with "The Kelly File," and it turned her into a cable-news A-lister. The show became one of the network's biggest ratings draws and was often discussed in the same breath as "The O'Reilly Factor." In 2014, TIME put her on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

In 2015, the political mood made it hard for anyone to come across as a neutral referee. At the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 race, Kelly was already a familiar face to millions. Even so, hardly anyone expected a single question to end up defining the night.

Kelly pressed Trump on his long history of insulting comments about women. This gives context to what you never knew about Trump. "You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals," she said via BBC. Then she asked (via IWMF): "Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?" 

Within hours, Trump was talking about Kelly like she was an adversary. In a CNN interview after the debate, he went further and made a crude remark: "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever." Looking back, Kelly told Frontline the reaction felt personal: "I do believe—I believe that night the anger was real. His anger at me was real that night."

Kelly, for her part, did not back off publicly. If anything, she leaned into the idea that she would press candidates when she thought they deserved it. "If you behave like a stupid moron, you're going to get called out by me," she told Variety. As the campaign moved forward and criticism of the press became a reliable rallying point for many Republicans, Kelly became a symbol in that fight. Not long after the debate, Public Policy Polling reported that 20% of Republicans viewed her negatively.

Kelly left Fox News in 2017 after more than a decade, and the decision immediately sparked talk about money. Reports at the time said she turned down a $20 million offer to stay. Publicly, Kelly presented the move as taking on "a new challenge." On X, she said she wanted more time with her kids: "The truth is, I need more of that in my life."

On "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Kelly suggested the choice had been building for a while. She said prime-time cable news no longer felt like the right fit, and that Trump's ongoing attacks helped settle the question. "Donald Trump has a way of clarifying one's life choices, and that was true in my case, too," she said. She described the fallout in more concrete terms to the BBC: "I was used to getting blowback from politicians, but this was of an order I had never seen before, and he really relentlessly kept it up for nine months, which led to a serious security situation in my life."

Later, in an interview with Frontline, Kelly still bristled at how the fallout played out. She argued the attacks weren't really aimed at her personal life so much as what she represented on TV. "The attacks weren't exactly on Megyn Kelly, the person. They were on Megyn Kelly, the brand, the journalist," she said, arguing that knocking her down served a purpose for Trump with his base. "It would send a message that they were tough, that they would fight for them," Kelly added.

Kelly officially joined NBC News in January 2017 after leaving Fox News. At the time, then–NBC News chairman Andrew Lack announced she'd anchor a new one-hour daytime show and a Sunday night newsmagazine under a multi-year deal. Kelly presented the leap as a personal fit, telling The New York Times, "This is what I was meant to do."

The deal was widely reported as $69 million over three years, and the Daily Mail noted that the number sparked executive blowback inside NBC. A high-ranking staffer told Daily Mail, "This is insane! How on earth can they justify paying her $69 million for three years? It's obscene and a giant slap in the face to all of NBC's established stars." That same report also quoted the warning, "When you add the cost of developing the show, hiring staff and promoting Megyn all the time, this adds up to a $100 million mistake."

Kelly later described the NBC stretch as an experience that changed her, for better or worse, depending on who is listening. In 2025, on "The Megyn Kelly Show," she said, "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."

Kelly's endorsement put a new ending on a story that began with Trump's 2016 "nasty" jab. In 2024, she endorsed him, and ahead of his 2025 inauguration, took to X (via The Independent), captioning a photo of the two: "God bless him. Go vote for him!" She also cast him as a "protector of women" (via ABC).

On Frontline, she said, "I think Trump is honest. I mean, he lies like all politicians lie, but there is a strain in Trump that's extremely honest." "I think he's got this flair for the dramatic. Like, I have a 13-year-old girl. They love drama, and I think Trump's got a fair amount of that in him, too," Kelly added.

After the 2025 inauguration, she told Sky News Australia the mood felt "like an instant utopia." She said, "Everything I'd hoped for is happening minute by minute." In another YouTube segment criticizing Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris, she told viewers, "Screw you, Taylor Swift." At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), she attacked the Associated Press for sticking with "Gulf of Mexico" instead of the administration's preferred "Gulf of America" after the White House revoked the outlet's access. Fox also reported that at a Turning Point USA event in 2025, Kelly said, "Once you pull the crazies out of there, it is overwhelmingly left-wing violence."

"Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly" was supposed to be the serious half of her NBC package. Instead, the show was quickly overshadowed by her Alex Jones interview, which aired on June 18, 2017, on Father's Day. Jones had spent years pushing the false claim that the Sandy Hook shooting was a government hoax. The point was never that Jones was newsworthy in the abstract. It was the specific history of what he had said about grieving families, and the fact that NBC chose to make that confrontation part of a glossy Sunday-night brand play.

Soon, Fox reported that JPMorgan pulled its commercials from NBC, while Sandy Hook Promise dropped Kelly as host of its Wednesday gala. Rolling Stone reported that as the network rushed to re-edit the segment, Jones released audio from a pre-show chat with Kelly. In it, she talks about wanting to show the left a different side of him and assures him she won't turn him into "some kind of bogeyman."

Kelly defended the decision in a statement on X, writing, "Our goal in sitting down with him was to shine a light — as journalists are supposed to do — on this influential figure, and yes — to discuss the considerable falsehoods he has promoted with near impunity." "Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly" ran eight episodes in summer 2017, and NBC ultimately decided not to bring it back for a full season.

Kelly's NBC run ended fast, after she discussed blackface on her show in a way many viewers found careless. On air (via BBC), Kelly asked, "What is racist? Back when I was a kid, that was okay just as long as you were dressing as a character." Kelly's words seemed to dismiss centuries of demeaning caricature. 

NBC signaled it would not debate the segment on the show. Then-chairman Andrew Lack told staff there was no place at the company for that kind of conversation. The moment also brought back older flashpoints from her career, including past remarks on Fox News that "Jesus was a white man too" (via The Guardian). Kelly apologized the next day, stating, "I have learned that given the history of blackface being used in awful ways by racists, it is not okay for that to be part of any costume, Halloween or otherwise."

By Friday, October 26, 2018, NBC announced the show was canceled. The network reached an agreement to pay Kelly the remainder of her contract, reportedly around 30 million dollars, according to the Independent. Reports from CNN confirmed that the talk of ending Megyn Kelly Today had started even before the controversy. Page Six also reported that both sides wanted to wrap it up quickly, quoting a source who said, "Everyone wants this to be over — both Megyn and NBC — and Comcast has the money to pay off Megyn." After leaving NBC, Kelly told TMZ, "You'll definitely see me back on."

After her NBC exit, Kelly described the next stretch as a reset and a chance to speak in her own voice. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she said, "The No. 1 thing I wanted to do was control my own editorial." She also told the WSJ, "I've been controlled by other people for too long."

On September 10, 2020, Kelly announced her independent company, Devil May Care Media, and "The Megyn Kelly Show" premiered soon after on September 28. She has linked the idea to a long stretch off air. In The New York Times, she recalled, "I was on my couch, figuratively, all of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, and the country was losing its mind." She told the Washington Examiner (via Tribune Chronicle) she did not see the point of returning to a major institution if it meant speech constraints, asking, "How could I go work someplace that was going to try to control my language on the gender issue, on the race issue?"

Kelly has pitched podcasting as the cleaner alternative to the broadcast pipeline. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Kelly said Ben Shapiro asked her to consider the podcast space. SiriusXM expanded Kelly's reach in 2021, announcing in July that her show would move to the Triumph channel with a video simulcast. She later said in a SiriusXM statement, "Linear television news is dead."

In 2025, Kelly launched MK Media in March as a video network for creators. A month earlier, she added a short daily product, "AM Update with Megyn Kelly," saying on megynkelly.com it was a response to what she called "leftist propaganda disguised as news."

On a November 13, 2025 episode of "The Megyn Kelly Show", Kelly made a point about Jeffrey Epstein that many listeners found hard to accept. Kelly said a trusted source told her Epstein wasn't a pedophile, and argued he was just into girls who were "barely legal." She then paused to insist, "I realize this is disgusting, I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this, I'm just giving you facts."

Kelly said her view shifted after Attorney General Pam Bondi described finding "tens of thousands" of child sexual abuse material videos on Epstein's computer. Then she questioned Bondi's credibility and said she did not trust her word anymore. She further said, "We have yet to see anybody come forward and say, 'I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.'"

When a guest rejected the relevance of that distinction, Kelly insisted, "There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?" The remarks aired the same day the House Oversight Committee released another 20,000 pages of records from Epstein's estate, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) accused Kelly of "dangerously [downplaying] the heinous nature of exploiting minors."

In February 2026, Trump snapped at CNN's Kaitlan Collins over her demeanor when she questioned him about the latest release of Epstein-related files (via New York Times). As Collins pressed him, Trump told her, "You are the worst reporter... I don't think I've ever seen you smile." 

Days later, Kelly defended the remark in an interview with Vice President JD Vance on The "Megyn Kelly Show", arguing Collins' on-air presentation had bothered her for a long time. "She never smiles," Kelly said. "Every once in a while, you have to smile. Roger Ailes used to tell us that... Every once in a while, you got to remember to smile, show the viewers that you have a heart." (Also, Kelly and Collins' feud is not new, so the concern-trolling did not exactly come out of nowhere.)

The clip set off immediate pushback online, much of it focused on Kelly's choice to cite Ailes. In her 2016 memoir "Settle for More," Kelly described alleged harassment by Ailes early in her Fox career, as reported by ABC. One X user reacted to Kelly's Ailes reference by writing, "NO S*** HE WAS A PREDATOR." Another pointed to the gap between Kelly's memoir and her 2026 commentary, asking why she was "talking about the advice he gave female anchors at fox to smile from time to time?????" A third argued that invoking Ailes to defend Trump was "REALLY helping Trump look less sexist."