KELLY FLOP
Red-faced NBC cancels $69M Megyn after ‘blackface’ scandal
‘TODAY” show host Megyn Kelly had it all — a prime slot on NBC’s flagship morning show and a deal that’s paying her $69 million over three years.
Then, halfway through that contract, and despite up-and-down ratings, she told the world what she really thinks, live on the air.
“Back when I was a kid, that was OK,” she griped on “Megyn Kelly Today” Tuesday as she recalled the long-lost days when, in her mind, white kids were free to wear blackface for Halloween.
“Just as long as you were dressing as a character,” Kelly “explained.”
The backlash, online and even among her colleagues — notably “Today” mainstay Al Roker — was immediate.
Despite her private and public apologies, it took just 48 hours for NBC to kick Kelly to the curb of 30 Rock on Thursday, yanking her show from the airwaves, as first reported by Page Six. But she isn’t leaving quietly. The former Fox News darling wants her friend and ex-NBC colleague Ronan Farrow — whose exposé of Harvey Weinstein helped bring down the pervy producer and launch the #MeToo movement — to be present during exit talks slated for as early as Friday.
Her lawyer, Bryan Freedman, “is meeting with NBC execs [Friday] and has requested that Ronan Farrow attend so he can be a witness” to Kelly’s exit negotiations, a source told Page Six.
T HE odds of Farrow setting foot inside NBC again are slim, given his own public dispute with the Peacock Network’s news chairman, Andy Lack, a clash Kelly egged on and joined in.
Farrow had initially penned his Weinstein piece for NBC after the network commissioned him, as a freelancer, to investigate rumors of the movie mogul’s casting couches and loosened bathrobes.
Instead, NBC and Lack balked, spiking the piece in August 2017, Farrow has said.
Farrow then took his work to The New Yorker magazine, which on Oct. 10, 2017, ran his bombshell article revealing that dozens of women had accused Weinstein of rape, assault and harassment.
Since then, Farrow, 30, and Kelly, 47, have publicly sparred with Lack over the story being spiked.
Last month, Kelly used her own show — on NBC’s own airwaves — to call on the network to hire a firm to look into how it bungled Farrow’s reporting on Weinstein.
“There’s the question of the faith and confidence of the public in the reporting of NBC on matters involving itself,” she said.
“For me, as a lawyer, it’s always better if you just send it outside,” Kelly, who has a law degree from Albany Law School, said in urging an external probe. “And then people have more faith in it.”
Practically speaking, given the zero likelihood of NBC inviting Farrow to join an already-toxic fray, Kelly is taking one last, feeble public shot at the network, this time by bouncing a stink bomb against the studio doors now closed to her.
It’s an even more feeble shot given that Farrow himself may be in the dark about the move by Team Kelly.
“Ronan knows nothing about this,” a source told Page Six later on Thursday.
With her last-ditch theatrics, Kelly seems determined to continue causing real damage to the network, one NBC insider complained.
“Megyn’s pattern of racial insensitivity has bitten her badly here,” the insider said.
“And this transparent attempt to distract from the pain she has caused with her comments is really unseemly.”
I T’S hardly the first time Kelly has been accused of racial insensitivity.
One of Kelly’s former Fox News colleagues, Kirsten Powers, now a CNN commentator, dished in a USA Today column Thursday about several disputes in which she said the rancorous anchor displayed outright bigotry.
One dispute, in 2008, involved a Fox News caption that referred to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama.” The line was condemned as racist, but Kelly was dismissive off-air, Powers wrote. Just a stupid joke, she said Kelly insisted. Others who had worked with Kelly gave insight into her long history of undermining colleagues and underlings.
“She’s disrespectful,” Iren Halperin, a Fox News makeup artist for 20 years who retired in 2016, told Page Six in February. “She’s not for women. She’s extremely mean and rude to women.”
Halperin eventually asked to be switched to a different anchor.
“She was difficult and demanding,” Halperin recalled. “And if you didn’t do what she wanted, she would try to get you in trouble.”
When Kelly moved to NBC, a series of on-air snafus led insiders to whisper that the new host’s “likability” was faltering.
Insiders complained she was giving “Today” a bad name by alienating bigtime guests — and her colleagues.
“She is hated inside the ‘Today’ show
and is seen as tarnishing the brand, out of control and selfish,” an NBC source told Page Six in February.
“The atmosphere is really negative . . . [Producers] just want to get through this,” the source added.
When Katie Couric was tapped to anchor NBC’s broadcast of the Winter Games’ Opening Ceremony in Pyeongchang, Kelly “threw an Olympic fit,” sources told Page Six in January.
She “complained to her staff, she complained to her agent, so that [Lack] would hear about the fact that she was unhappy, but he didn’t care,” one source said.
And when Hoda Kotb landed Matt Lauer’s job, Kelly congratulated her “Mean Girls”-style by referring — live on the air and without elaboration — to a “dark period” in Kotb’s life.
“Everybody in the control room gasped when Megyn brought up Hoda’s ‘dark period’ . . . That comment was awkward, mean-spirited. It really stung,” an NBC News insider recalled to Page Six. T HE controversies overshadow some considerable career highlights.
Kelly’s big “gets” include an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin on NBC last year and one with President Trump on Fox News in 2016 after feuding with him the previous year.
Who could forget Kelly’s opening salvo as a moderator at the first Republican presidential primary debate in 2015?
“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs’ and ‘disgusting animals,’ ” Kelly pressed Trump, who replied, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”
And who could forget the war that followed, when Trump hit back at Kelly’s debate grilling, telling CNN, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever.”
Meanwhile, speculation was rampant Thursday about Kelly’s next move.
One Hollywood vet said the industry buzz is that Kelly will need to “go away for a while, take a break and come back.”
“She’s toxic [right now]. She’d have to come back with a different idea and a new approach,” the veteran added.
But if she walks away from negotiations — with or without Farrow — with what remains of her reported $69 million, she could certainly afford to take a break and mull her options.