All week, Megyn Kelly has led her 9 a.m. NBC show, the plummeting ratings-beset Megyn Kelly Today, with the latest revelations in the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
On Friday morning, Kelly got personal, mocking her old nemesis President Donald Trump and shaming his longtime lawyer and spokesman Michael Cohen for a tweet Cohen had retweeted encouraging personal violence against Kelly.
Kelly was speaking about actress Rose McGowan, whose temporary suspension from Twitter caused much outrage Thursday. Twitter, noted Kelly, had justified this ban because McGowan—who has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape, and “has found her voice and platform” on Twitter, as Kelly put it—had published a personal telephone number on the social media platform. (Weinstein denies the allegations of non-consensual sex against him.)
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“One can understand Twitter’s strict adherence to the rules…rules like the ones that don’t allow one person to harass another; rules that don’t allow the incitement of harassment, or one person to threaten another.”
Kelly paused.
“Now who do we know who’s ever done that on Twitter?”
The crowd laughed at the unmentioned name of President Donald Trump, and his infamous campaign of vitriol he waged against Kelly.
“No, not him,” Kelly, said laughing. “Well him, too.”
She then named Cohen, and recalled that after the first presidential debate in August 2015, in which Kelly tackled Trump on his misogyny—and after which he opined she had “blood coming out of her wherever”—Cohen had retweeted a tweet from an account that read:
Kelly said, “Michael Cohen retweeted a threat directed very personally against yours truly encouraging folks—and I quote—to ‘gut’ me. To gut me. ‘We can gut her.’” (In full, the tweet read: “#boycottmegynkelly @realDonaldTrump we can gut her.”)
“I remember Twitter rushing to enforce its rules,” Kelly said sarcastically, then paused. “No, no I don’t.”
She added, “The point is not to dredge up that old dispute.” (Well, it kind of was, at least in part.) “It’s to say there’s an inconsistency here. Who’s Twitter kidding? Right? Give me a break. Twitter, do better. Do better.”
Not for the first time this week, Megyn Kelly on Harvey Weinsten sounded more like the combative Kelly of Fox News yore than the positive and soft daytime anchor she is presently, and imperfectly, attempting to embody.
After going after Trump and Cohen, Kelly returned to her new persona and next segment: “In more important news: Should your spouse be your best friend?”
