Names and faces
Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News Channel personality who tried to transition to softer news at NBC, was fired
Friday from her morning show after triggering a furor by suggesting it was OK for white people to wear blackface at Halloween. “‘Megyn Kelly Today’ is not returning,” NBC News said in a statement. The show occupied the fourth hour of NBC’s Today program, a time slot that will be hosted by other co-anchors next week, the network said. While NBC didn’t address Kelly’s future at the network, negotiations over her exit are underway, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity. Bryan Freedman, an attorney for Kelly, said in a statement that she “remains an employee of NBC News and discussions about next steps are continuing.” He did not elaborate. Kelly, 47, is in the second year of a threeyear contract that reportedly pays her more than $20 million a year. The show’s cancellation came four days after she provoked a firestorm for her on-air comments about blackface as a costume. “But what is racist?” Kelly said Tuesday. “Truly, you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.” Critics accused her of ignoring the ugly history of minstrel shows and movies in which whites applied blackface to mock blacks as lazy, ignorant or cowardly. Kelly apologized to fellow NBC employees later in the day and made a tearful apology on her show Wednesday. Kelly, who made her debut on NBC in 2017, did not host episodes of Megyn Kelly Today as scheduled on Thursday and Friday.
Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, who last year changed her name to Magda Davitt, has renounced Catholicism and converted to Islam. The firebrand musician, who infamously ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992 as a protest against the Catholic Church at the peak of her popularity, made the announcement Oct. 19 on Twitter. The “Nothing Compares 2 U” singer also noted that she had changed her name to Shuhada’ Davitt. (Shuhada’ means “martyr” or “witness” in Arabic.) “This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant,” wrote Sinead, a longtime critic of the Catholic Church. The 51-year-old has been posting selfies of herself wearing hijabs on Twitter in recent days, as well as a video in which she sang the Azan, or call to prayer. In recent years, the singer has openly spoken about her mental-health issues.