When Did Megyn Kelly Become a Conspiracy Theorist?

Screenshot via YouTube.

Megyn Kelly has worn a lot of prominent hats in the media industry, from hosting shows on Fox and NBC to legal analysis, but now it seems she has taken on a new role as a conspiracy theorist. Most recently she has accused this particular website of refusing to cover her unsubstantiated speculation about the culprit behind the Tucker Carlson leaks because we are “scared” — just the latest example of a troubling pattern of conspiracy mongering.

In the days since Carlson’s shocking defenestration from his lofty perch as Fox News’ top-rated host, a series of communications and videos have been leaked, revealing admissions about his views on former President Donald Trump, racially-charged discussions, and sexist, misogynistic behavior.

Some of the leaks seem to involve content generated internally at Fox, and some include material likely turned over to Dominion Voting Systems during discovery as part of their defamation lawsuit against the network, thereby leaving open a host of possibilities as to the potential culprit(s). A current Fox employee? A disgruntled former one? Dominion? Someone else who had access to the unredacted discovery? Tucker Carlson himself? In a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Media Matters stop publishing the leaked content, Fox maintained that the video footage is “FOX’s confidential intellectual property” and was released without its consent. Fox separately condemned the leaked texts in a sharply worded letter to Dominion’s legal counsel.

Critically important: right now, we do not know who exactly is responsible for the leaks.

But that fact hasn’t stopped Kelly from accusing Irena Briganti, Fox’s senior executive vice president of corporate communications, of being behind the leaks. Kelly has offered zero proof, not even bothering to cite any unnamed source or secondhand gossip or salacious rumor she saw scrawled on a gas station bathroom wall, merely offering her speculation about “what I think’s going on here.”

“This is my guess, I don’t have inside knowledge of this,” admitted Kelly on her podcast last week as she accused Briganti of being behind negative press stories about Carlson.

In Thursday’s episode of her podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, Kelly declared it was “very clear” to her that Briganti was “trying to suppress any commentary yours truly is making about her — I can see her fingerprints there,” accusing media outlets, including CNN and Mediaite, of not covering her claims at Fox’s behest:

Normally, somebody like me making claims like this about somebody like her would be all over a website like Mediaite, which covers journalists and news about journalists, and certainly when one journalist says something like I’m saying, umm, you know why it’s not there? Because she’s got ’em by the balls. They’re afraid of her — she’s their sieve of leaks and access to anything about Fox, so they’re too scared to write it up…Umm, CNN, same — they also rely on this woman, because they need to go to her for access on stories like this one, Tucker, and they can’t afford to upset this lady, because she’s powerful.

Putting aside the notion that Mediaite not covering something Kelly says is somehow notable, our team has extensively covered — including with some of our own original reporting — Carlson’s ouster from Rupert Murdoch’s corporate universe and the content leaked in the days that followed, being very clear to note the person responsible for the leaks is not yet known.

And as my colleague Ken Meyer pointed out, it “defies logic that Fox News leadership would leak videos of an ex-host trashing the network’s vaunted streaming platform” at all, and especially to the progressive Media Matters, which is loathed by Fox.

If you are a regular reader of Mediaite — or the media reporting of CNN, which doesn’t even refer to Fox as a news network — you will likely find the claim that Fox has either media outlet “by the balls” as amusing as we do, and the accusation that we need to stay in a Fox executive’s good graces to report on the network is beyond laughable. Mediaite had multiple sources for our report confirming Carlson was fired, as we have for many stories about Fox over the years without ever depending on Fox executives as a gatekeeper of access or information. The ever-growing collection of op-eds critical of Fox written by pretty much our entire staff also throws the iciest bucket of cold water on Kelly’s farcical musings.

“This is completely false and an outright lie,” Fox News said in a statement responding to Kelly’s accusations about Briganti.

More importantly, Kelly’s defensiveness here of her unsourced and unproven claims about Fox isn’t a one-off, but part of an ongoing pattern as she repeatedly dons tin foil hats in the hope of attracting an audience from the festering corners of the internet.

Last year, Kelly aggressively attacked Don Lemon after he was accused by a Hamptons bartender of assault. Dustin Hice’s lawsuit claimed he had encountered Lemon at a bar and the then-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, after both of his witnesses flipped on him and were listed as witnesses for the defense, and then the judge sanctioned him for destroying evidence. Had the case gone to trial, Hice would have had only his own testimony to support his case and would have been confronted his own text messages directly undermining his claims.

Facing that reality and already owing Lemon over $77,000 in attorney’s fees, Hice dropped the case, releasing a statement saying that he had misremembered events. Lemon’s attorney Caroline Polisi declared her client had now been “fully vindicated” and had “never paid a dime” to Hice.

“I hope that many in the media have learned their lesson on misreporting the facts and jumping to conclusions,” wrote Polisi in a statement.

Kelly apparently did not learn any such lesson. After having Hice as a guest on her podcast early in the litigation, she continued to promote his claims even as the lawsuit crumbled into dust, ignoring all the evidence in the easily-accessible public court file.

After the case was dropped, Kelly was adamant that Lemon must have paid a “nice fat check” to Hice. When multiple reporters, including myself, pushed back, Kelly doubled down, firing off multiple tweets accusing her critics of being “clueless” and engaging in “spin.”

She followed up by literally tweeting she was “Tripling down!” and then went for the quadruple down in a nearly 8-minute monologue on her podcast. Despite admitting she had “no reportable evidence,” Kelly nonetheless insisted that the only reason Hice would ever have agreed to drop the suit was if he were paid off, using arguments that contained egregious misrepresentations about the case and omitted what I described as “metaphorical truckloads of information,” including the piles of evidence in the court file.

Kelly again trafficked in baseless accusations last fall, this time against the San Francisco Police Department when Paul Pelosi, husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a hammer-wielding David DePape.

DePape was reportedly shouting “Where is Nancy?” and his blog posts complained about a long list of grievances commonly associated with Trump and his supporters. After the attack, various conspiracy theories about the attack spread online, mostly promoted by right-wing media figures.

The SFPD chief quickly smacked down the conspiracies himself in multiple interviews, including an Oct. 31, 2022 CNN appearance. The very next day, Kelly told her podcast audience she didn’t trust the police narrative about the crime.

“I don’t know what went on,” Kelly admitted but then accused the SFPD of nefariously hiding…something. “I know enough to smell a rat. There’s something going on here that they’re not telling us. I just don’t know what it is.”

She was enraged when a New York Times article a few days later included her in a list of conservative media figures who “spread misinformation or cast doubt on the attack.”

“It’s called JOURNALISM,” Kelly seethed on Twitter, claiming “SFPD clearly has more to disclose,” even though, once again, she did not have any proof or even an anonymous source who was saying so. After footage from the police body cameras and the Pelosis’ home security system was released, it did in fact confirm the SFPD’s description of events. No correction or apology was forthcoming from Kelly, but that’s not surprising.

Self-publishing and podcasting can give journalists the freedom to pursue stories that match their interests and passions, without being beholden to corporate overlords or fussy editors. But when someone like Kelly repeatedly uses her platform to peddle baseless speculation, stubbornly double triple quadruple down when presented with contrary evidence, and then furiously attack that anyone who criticizes her — or, perhaps worse in this click-driven internet age, dares to ignore her — instead of being an avatar of independent journalism, she becomes the poster child for its pitfalls.

This article has been updated with additional information.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.