Content warning: sexual harassment, assault, rape, pedophilia
There’s this scene in Transformers: Age of Extinction1 when Mark Wahlberg finds out that his 17-year-old daughter is dating a 20-year-old man who is also the boyfriend from Midsommar. And Matt or whatever pulls out a laminated piece of paper explaining that it’s ~*actually*~ not illegal, due to their “pre-existing juvenile foundational relationship.”
A thing like that brings up questions. Questions like, what is going on here? Why do you as a man have a laminated “I’m not committing statutory rape” card in your wallet? Or, why didn’t the screenwriter just make the daughter 18, so statutory rape isn’t part of the plot? Or, why do I feel like a lot of people involved specifically wanted the allure of statutory rape with a sheen of legality in their tentpole blockbuster for some reason?
Roughly a decade ago, Megyn Kelly was actually kind of respectable. Liberals are always on the hunt for “reasonable” conservatives, for some reason, and for a while, she was a go-to. She would use her legal background to tussle with Bill O’Reilly about the Supreme Court, she defended paid parental leave (after she and her husband took it; before then, she thought paternity leave was a waste of money); and she clashed quite vividly with Donald Trump by asking him a pretty basic question about whether his temperament was disqualifying during a 2015 presidential debate. She was blonde and pretty and committed to a feisty persona that white liberals, and white women in particular, really respond to.
Then, in 2016, she became liberals’ favourite conservative girlboss when she alleged that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had sexually harassed her early in her tenure with the network. She and Gretchen Carlson were hailed as the women who took down a dragon. She became a bit of a media darling at that point, despite her pretty flagrant racism and overall mediocrity as a journalist.
Kelly was such a mainstream face of sexual harassment survivors that Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron wore prosthetic eyelids to portray her in the movie retelling of the Roger Ailes takedown. Yet this past week, this same woman rouged her knees, over-steamed her extensions, and took to her podcast to explain the difference between raping a 5-year-old and raping a 15-year-old.
“As for Epstein, I’ve said this before: I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything—not everything, but virtually everything. And this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this. but that he was into the ‘barely legal’ type, like he liked 15 year old girls. And I realize this is disgusting, I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for it, i’m just giving you the facts. that he wasn’t into like 8-year-olds, but he liked the very young teen types who could pass for even younger than they were, but that would look legal to a passerby.
“And that it what I believed and what I reliably was told for many years and it wasn’t until we heard from Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged—forgive me, they used to call it ‘kiddie porn’, now they call it ‘child sexual abuse material’— on his computer that for the first time i thought, oh no, he was an actual pedophile. I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. She’s never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true, I have to be honest. I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore…so, I don’t know what’s true about him. But we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, “I was 8. I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview.” Look—you can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference. There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.”
…So, let’s all take an everything shower break after that one.
The way she uses “barely legal” as a category as if it exists anywhere but scuzzy porn sites is incredible on its own; even more so when she completely redefines it to mean “absolutely fucking illegal.” And obviously, her “there is a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old” is her grand finale. Look at the gleam in her dead eyes as she tries to make “technically, he’s a hebophile” happen.
But I want to focus on what she does between those two achievements in moral turpitude.
First, she quite brazenly shifts the goalposts on holding any person involved accountable for any thing. Nobody has come forward saying that they were “under 10, or under 14”—allegedly, that’s now the point at which she’ll care. Of course, if a woman does come forward saying she was 10 years old when she got pulled into Epstein’s operation, Kelly will find someone else at fault for allowing the child to be sex trafficked in the first place. The sex traffickers and abusers themselves, however, will still escape her judgment.
Second, the way she juxtaposes “kiddie porn” with “child sexual abuse material” is breathtaking in its audacity. Because if you take it at face value, she’s just acknowledging a former colloquial term while updating her audience on the correct legal term. But her sardonic tone when she says the legal term, coupled with the shifting accountability goalposts, sounds an awful lot like someone trying to minimize the entire issue. Like people are taking the whole thing too seriously. And again, a thing like that brings up questions. Such as: who would she be doing that for?
Since Megyn Kelly isn’t and doesn’t want to be part of Trump’s administration (she’s clinging to being a registered Independent, and he still doesn’t like her), I don’t think he is the specific audience for this rancid line of defense. That’s for the Mike Johnsons and Kristi Noems of the world. No, I think Megyn’s audience is broader than that. She’s letting all the most powerful ghouls in this world know that they are safe with her. She’ll provide cover for these people, as long as they aren’t Democrats, until the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. She’s analyzed the power structure and decided that she never wants to be on the other side of it again. I hate to quote myself, but I have to quote myself:
There are women who take a great deal of pride in not supporting anything that could be labeled as a “women’s issue.” Political pick-me’s who will blame women being insufficiently tough and/or womanly, depending on the issue, for anything that could be solved or prevented by a just and human-centered system. These women don’t need abortion rights, because only the wrong kind of woman needs an abortion. They don’t need equal pay, because they don’t want handouts just because they’re women. “I’m not a feminist” is a boringly popular TikTok prompt for a reason.
For these cretins, the moral high ground is wherever they need it to be in order to keep protecting their own power. Nothing else matters, not even things they’ve quite famously said in the past. Like what Kelly herself said in 2017, in the wake of sexual harassment allegations about Charlie Rose.
Even when Kelly was more sympathetic towards sexual harassment survivors—that is, when she found it advantageous to count herself among them—note where she says the solution lies. It’s not in men stopping their behavior, or stopping other men. It’s not in legislation and enforcement that takes harassment and assault seriously. It’s in women who are being harassed and assaulted to, essentially, boss up. To “hold the powerful to account.” Her tone is one of female empowerment, and that’s how her audience reacts. That’s how the people who made Bombshell reacted. But what she’s saying is anti-feminist, individualistic, and defeatist. Because what she’s saying is, “who needs a systemic change when individual fortitude will do? Just don’t be a woman who deserves and therefore allows herself to be harassed, and nothing more needs to happen!”
So, as truly repulsive2 as Megyn Kelly is being now, it’s not really deviating from her pattern. She was never, as that tweet says, a “normal” Republican. She and her kind are just power worshippers, and will say whatever amasses and protects the most power. She’s perfectly content giving a sheen of legality to powerful people’s monstrous behavior. That’s why she, a festering canker sore of a human being, continues to have a successful podcast after publicly and unapologetically copping pleas for pedophiles, sex traffickers, and rapists.
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