Megyn Kelly’s Extreme Makeover

Do you remember Megyn Kelly? I once walked past her in a Chicago O’Hare bathroom in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had won his first presidential election, and was momentarily stopped in my tracks by both her nuclear-grade charisma and her pixie cut.

For a woman to have short hair on Fox News, where Kelly was a star anchor at the time, seemed as seditious to the network’s established order as reading Judith Butler or Karl Marx live on air.

But this was a moment during which Kelly seemed to be leaning into the role of crusader for women—speaking out about being sexually harassed by the former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and so inflaming Trump with her rigorous questioning during one debate that he later insinuated on CNN that she must have had her period .

All of which makes it so disconcerting, 10 years later, to see Kelly now, on her daily SiriusXM and YouTube show, cursing and sneering with long barrel curls and the gusto of someone hosting not a discussion of polling data but a Two Minutes Hate.

“I’m just gonna be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal,” Kelly said on Monday, discussing the anonymous woman who has filed a lawsuit detailing her alleged gang rape at Cornell University. (The men named in the lawsuit have denied any wrongdoing.) “She’s extremely”—here Kelly screwed up her face in disgust—“ beefy in, like, her arms and her legs.

She has a whole video online talking about her cankles.

And she possibly enjoyed being admired.

This is how women make these mistakes.

Admired, wanted—some women even foolishly say loved —by these guys at Cornell.

This is probably a first for her.

She’s probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one.” [ Sophie Gilbert: Is college getting less safe for women? ] We’ve seen some drastic heel turns in the media over the past few decades, but none quite as morally appalling as a former self-described advocate for female empowerment suggesting that a woman in this situation might have craved the attention because no one would have wanted to have sex with her otherwise. (Not to mention the contentions that the woman Kelly seems to be referring to, whose name has been leaked by some commentators, is not actually Jane Doe, based on her age and the fact that she would have been too young at the time to attend college.) Normally, I have a pretty strong constitution for this kind of bad-faith rage bait.

But Kelly’s display this week of what I can describe only as performative hysteria has been hard to watch.

Less than a minute into her show on Monday, she invoked the Salem witch trials.

Twenty-three minutes in came her first pronounced use of the word fuck (I counted seven in total).