Megyn Kelly Doubles Down on Baselessly Accusing Don Lemon of Paying Off Accuser to Settle Lawsuit

Sarah RumpfMay 2nd, 2022, 9:49 pm
 
Megyn Kelly interviews Dustin Hice

Megyn Kelly interviews Dustin Hice

Megyn Kelly baselessly accused CNN’s Don Lemon of paying a “nice fat check” to settle a lawsuit on Monday, doubling down on the accusation after several reporters (including your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor here) pushed back.

To recap: a former Hamptons bartender named Dustin Hice accused Lemon of assaulting him in a 2019 lawsuit claiming he had encountered Lemon at a bar and the CNN host had “put his hand down the front of his own shorts, and vigorously rubbed his genitalia, removed his hand and shoved his index and middle fingers into Plaintiff’s moustache under Plaintiff’s nose.”

Hice’s case fell apart in stunning fashion.

The two key witnesses he claimed in the complaint would back up his story instead contradicted him, with one recanting his prior testimony and the other denying she had seen what Hice claimed happened. Hice also committed a long series of misrepresentations, efforts to conceal and destroy evidence, and other misdeeds and shenanigans (including trespassing on Lemon’s property to take photographs “holding a lemon in front of his own genital area”), as Mediaite reported back in March.

Caroline Polisi, Lemon’s attorney, filed a motion for sanctions against Hice and prevailed, with the judge finding that Hice “did nothing to preserve relevant evidence here and in fact got rid of some of it, whether on purpose or not.” Hice was ordered to pay Lemon $77,119.33 in attorney’s fees. The judge also ruled that if the case went to trial, the jury would be given an “adverse inference” instruction to interpret Hice’s destruction of the evidence as prejudicial against him.

Hice’s attorney removed his witnesses from the plaintiff’s list, leaving Hice as the plaintiff the only one still willing to support his tale. Polisi responded by adding Hice’s two witnesses to the defense’s witness list, as their sworn testimony was now that Lemon did not assault Hice.

And then on Monday Hice dropped the lawsuit. A Stipulation of Voluntary Dismissal with Prejudice was submitted by both parties’ attorneys to the court, legally ending the lawsuit and barring Hice from any future attempts to amend or re-file the complaint against Lemon.

Last November, Kelly had interviewed Hice on her podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, and the day after that interview, Polisi sent Kelly a letter admonishing her for the “reckless reporting” on the case, including inaccurately characterizing the case as a “sexual assault” and ignoring the information in the publicly available court records regarding Hice’s own witnesses contradicting his story.

Monday afternoon, Puck News senior correspondent Dylan Byers tweeted the news that Hice had dropped his suit. Byers included both a statement from Hice claiming he had “come to realize that my recollection of the events that occurred on the night in question when I first met CNN anchor Don Lemon were not what I thought they were when I filed this lawsuit” as well as a statement from Polisi specifically stating that Lemon had not paid Hice any money to settle the case:

The Court’s ruling fully vindicates Mr. Lemon and brings an end to this abusive lawsuit. This case was a crass money grab from its inception. Mr. Lemon has never paid the plaintiff a dime over the course of this unfortunate spectacle, and he is looking forward to moving on with his life.

I hope that many in the media have learned their lesson on misreporting the facts and jumping to conclusions. The reporting on this story by many outlets has been a case-study in unethical and uninformed reporting.

Kelly reacted to the news by posting several tweets retweeting Byers and accusing Lemon of paying off Hice, without evidence to support that accusation.

“Case suddenly goes away on eve of trial & u believe it happened w/o Lemon’s ppl paying up?” tweeted Kelly. “If so you’re as dumb as Lemon.” She also accused the mainstream media of “running cover for one of their own” and ignoring Hice’s “MeToo story,” directly referencing the “unethical” media reporting line from Polisi’s statement.

Byers had deleted his original tweet to make a factual correction and Kelly retweeted the new tweet along with a comment, “There is zero chance they didn’t give Dustin Hice a nice fat check.”

Multiple Twitter users replied to Kelly, including Byers, this reporter, and CNN’s head of strategic communications Matt Dornic, pointing out Polisi’s statement that no money was paid to Hice and the case record showing the case “falling apart.”

Kelly fired back at Byers, calling him “clueless” and invoking the saying about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, implying she thought Byers was being bamboozled.

Byers replied he was “operating on the available evidence, as supplied by lawyers on the record,” and pointed out that she had not provided “any evidence whatsoever” to support her accusation.

Kelly replied that lawyers “try to spin,” and his job as a reporter was to “try to figure out the real story” and “not simply repeat spin like a [stenographer].” She claimed the case was not falling apart and that was “attny BS.”

“I stand by my previous point about evidence, which seems especially germane to legal matters,” Byers tweeted in response.

Polisi was unequivocal in her rejection of Kelly’s accusation, telling Mediaite “not a single penny was paid by Don Lemon or any of his representatives to Mr. Hice or anyone having anything to do with Mr. Hice.”

“The only monetary judgment in this case came from the Court ordering Mr. Hice to pay Mr. Lemon’s attorneys fees because of his egregious misconduct in this litigation,” she added. “It doesn’t get much clearer than that.”

“That’s not spin, that’s a fact, and there’s nothing more to say,” Polisi concluded.

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Sarah Rumpf - Contributing Editor

Sarah Rumpf joined Mediaite in 2020 and is a Contributing Editor focusing on politics, law, and the media. A native Floridian, Sarah attended the University of Florida, graduating with a double major in Political Science and German, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the UF College of Law. Sarah's writing has been featured at National Review, The Daily Beast, Reason, Law&Crime, Independent Journal Review, Texas Monthly, The Capitolist, Breitbart Texas, Townhall, RedState, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Austin-American Statesman, and her political commentary has led to appearances on television, radio, and podcast programs across the globe. Follow Sarah on Threads, Twitter, and Bluesky.