Even had there been no news in Megyn Kelly’s new memoir, “Settle for More,” the book would have drawn a considerable audience. Ms. Kelly, the 45-year-old anchor on Fox News, has emerged as this presidential election’s unlikely feminist heroine and Hildy Johnson, the intrepid gal reporter who made herself indispensable to the brass and resisted the herd mentality of the men around her. She was the hen in the Fox house, taking it upon herself to ask at nearly every turn: Shouldn’t we be concerned that the Republican nominee for president is profoundly disrespectful of women in his public discourse? And accused of being a sexual predator at that?
That man, Donald J. Trump, is now America’s president-elect. After reading Ms. Kelly’s book, scheduled to be published Nov. 15 but obtained early by The New York Times, I must say I feel nervous for her. According to her book, Mr. Trump did not take kindly to Ms. Kelly’s questions, and he appeared to retaliate in creepy, personal ways. Many journalists are already concerned that he has little regard for their professional responsibilities or First Amendment rights. “Settle for More” won’t allay their fears.
Ms. Kelly writes that her problems started in August, the Monday before the first Republican presidential primary debate. She had just done a segment on her show, “The Kelly File,” that infuriated Mr. Trump. He refused to make his own scheduled appearance on her show unless she phoned him personally.
“I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you,” she says he told her, “and I still may.”
Then, the day before the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump was in a lather again, Ms. Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him.” This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.
She doesn’t speculate where the leak came from. (She reports. You decide.) But that’s another unambiguous takeaway from this book: Parts of Fox — or at the very least, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman until July, when he was given the boot after several allegations of sexual harassment were made against him — seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee.
“Folks were starting to worry about Trump — his level of agitation did not match the circumstances,” Ms. Kelly writes. “Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes.”
Her story becomes more byzantine. On the day of the debate, Ms. Kelly writes, she woke up feeling great. Then an overzealous, suspiciously enthusiastic driver picked her up to take her to the convention center. He insisted on getting her coffee, though she’d repeatedly declined his offer. Once it was in her hand, she drank it. And within 15 minutes, she was violently ill, vomiting so uncontrollably that it was unclear if she’d be able to go on and help moderate that evening. It was so bad that she kept a trash pail beneath her desk throughout the debate, just in case.
Ms. Kelly never says outright that someone tried to poison her. (A stomach bug was going around, she notes.) But the episode spooked her enough that she shared it later with Roger Ailes and a lawyer friend of his. Foul play? Again: She reports. You decide.
As we all know, Mr. Trump did unleash his beautiful Twitter account on Ms. Kelly after that debate, and it threatened to upend her life. He called her “overrated,” “angry,” “crazy” and “a bimbo”; he went on CNN with Don Lemon opposite her show’s time slot and said there was blood coming out of Ms. Kelly’s eyes, “blood coming out of her … whatever.” (My favorite response to this: Katie Couric wrote Ms. Kelly a note asking: “Are you okay? Do you need some Tampax?”)
The hectoring went on for weeks. “Every time Trump acted up,” Ms. Kelly writes, “it was like he flipped a switch, instantly causing a flood of intense nastiness.” Kelly’s voice mail box filled with invective and obscenities. People phoned in with death threats. Ms. Kelly’s young daughter asked her what a bimbo was; a suspicious man showed up in the lobby of her apartment building; her family took an armed guard to Disney World.
It didn’t help that Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen retweeted this message from a Trump supporter: “#boycottmegynkelly @realDonaldTrump we can gut her.”
Part of Mr. Trump’s response seemed like that of a man betrayed: Months before announcing his candidacy, he had tried hard to curry Ms. Kelly’s favor. He sent her notes, including an attagirl scrawled across her picture in The New York Times Magazine . (When Vanity Fair reported this, Mr. Trump denied it; Ms. Kelly includes proof, a picture.) Ms. Kelly and her husband declined an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s fabled estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Then Mr. Trump tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to persuade her to let him pick up the tab for the weekend she spent with two girlfriends at the Trump SoHo hotel.
“This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign,” Ms. Kelly writes. “I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous — from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.”
Usually, if a presidential candidate impugns the integrity of a journalist, the head of the news organization rushes to his or her employee’s defense. But Fox is no regular news organization, and Mr. Ailes was no ordinary boss. “Every time he started in,” Ms. Kelly writes of Mr. Trump, “I’d get a call from Roger (who was getting calls from Trump). Was I being fair to Trump? Was I being too hard on him? He felt the bar for skeptical Trump coverage should be higher.”
When Mr. Trump discharged his first round of spite tweets, Ms. Kelly’s husband, the novelist Douglas Brunt, demanded to know what Fox was going to do. “I told him the truth. ‘Nothing for now.’” Instead, the network tried appeasement. “Roger was talking to Trump daily,” she writes, “trying to calm him down.”
It turns out that Mr. Trump and Mr. Ailes have a number of things in common besides their politics. Both are 70-something tycoons. Both are obsessed with loyalty, thin-skinned and fragile. And both face accusations of sexual harassment from a number of women. The anchor Gretchen Carlson was the first to make this claim in public against Mr. Ailes. But she was by no means the only one. As Radar Online has already reported, Ms. Kelly confirms in her memoir that about a decade ago, she, too, was on the receiving end of Mr. Ailes’s advances.
She declines to get into many specifics, apart from his conjecture about the “very sexy bras” she must own and how he’d like to see her in them. “But suffice it to say, he made sexual comments to me, offers of professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors.” In 2006, she writes, Mr. Ailes tried to grab her and kiss her on the lips. Ms. Kelly dodged him twice and made a beeline for the door — at which point, she writes, he asked her an ominous question: “When is your contract up?” Then he lunged for the third time.
She consulted a lawyer. “But I knew the reality of the situation,” she continues. “If I caused a stink, my career would likely be over.”
Years later, when Ms. Carlson made her allegations against Mr. Ailes, Ms. Kelly was asked to speak in support of him. When she refused, Mr. Ailes “engineered hit pieces about me online,” she writes.
“I realized,” she continues, “I had a choice to make.” She could be quiet. Or: “I could ensure that the owners of Fox News Channel — Rupert Murdoch and his sons — understood they might actually have a predator running their company.”
She chose to call Lachlan Murdoch, executive co-chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox.
Throughout the 2016 election, Ms. Kelly questioned Mr. Trump and his surrogates about the sexual harassment and assault accusations rapidly accumulating against him. But her memoir is a reminder that she is a complicated feminist figure — starting with the fact that she rejects the label “feminist.” The needle she threads has an almost microscopic eye. She is trying simultaneously to appeal to both her new “Lean-In” fan base and the regular Fox news watchers who abhor identity politics.
“The less time talking about our gender, the better,” she writes, adding that she’s made her own destiny: “So many broadcasters line up outside the boss’s office, asking for this show or that one. I’ve spent my time in my own office, working night and day, and opportunity came to me.”
This book will doubtless have sex appeal among gossips and Kelly obsessives. But the author wants to do more than tell a juicy story. She’s positioned this book as a self-help guide — please see the title — and I was, I’ll confess, quite curious about this aspect of it, reading “Settle for More” in the way a springer spaniel might read the memoir of a Siamese cat.
How does one become so fabulous, shrewd and self-possessed? And what’s it like?
I will admit I was hoping to find a bit of springer spaniel in her. Something a little eager to please, a little vulnerable, a little high-strung.
And she is, on occasion. But she’s also a celebrity with an image to manage. Ultimately, we’re supposed to aspire to her life. Her husband? Dreamy. Her kids? Phenomenal. Her job? Flexible! Even if it’s on TV. Her message is that with hard work, and an attentiveness to our true needs, we can achieve such things.
Me, I’m not feeling it. Like most superstars, Ms. Kelly is a metabolic anomaly. She’s willed herself into her own spectacular existence. Along the way, she got the best and the worst of the next president of the United States.
