By JT Santana | jtwb768
Megyn Kelly has every right to question evidence in the Cornell Seven case. She has every right to defend due process, challenge inconsistencies, scrutinize a civil complaint, and reject the idea that an accusation should automatically be treated as a criminal conviction. None of that requires what she has done to Jane Doe. Kelly moved far beyond evidentiary scrutiny when she speculated about Jane Doe’s looks, body, desirability, motives, drinking, and supposed excitement at receiving sexual attention from multiple men.
On the October 5 edition of The Megyn Kelly Show, Kelly described Jane Doe as “not the most attractive gal,” commented on her arms, legs, and “cankles,” then proposed a theory that Doe may have enjoyed being wanted by several men. Kelly went on to suggest that this attention may have felt like a “win” to a woman she portrayed as someone who had not grown up exceptionally attractive. She then questioned why anyone should “go right to she’s a victim” and pointed to the roughly three-week interval between the alleged assault and Doe’s report to Cornell police. That is not serious analysis of consent. It is character construction built from appearance, sexual stereotypes, and speculation. (Media Matters for America) (https://youtu.be/gkNgAJTWfgk?is=m0eQQLkP8_GoHzty)
The problem becomes harder to excuse when Kelly’s own history is placed beside those remarks. Kelly has publicly described unwanted sexual advances from former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. In 2016, she explained that she did not accuse Ailes publicly when the conduct occurred years earlier, saying such a move could have destroyed her career. She said she was early in her Fox tenure, that Ailes dominated the institution, and that confronting him publicly would have carried enormous professional risk. She knew firsthand that a woman can assess danger, fear consequences, remain quiet publicly, and still be telling the truth about what happened to her. (ABC News)
Jane Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, seized on that contradiction after Kelly criticized the delay in going to police. Giuffra asked Kelly to reflect on why women can struggle to come forward and on the courage required when they do. His wording about Kelly waiting years “to report” Ailes deserves a factual correction: Kelly has said she called a lawyer and told a Fox supervisor shortly after the alleged conduct in 2006. Her public account came much later. That distinction does not erase the larger contradiction. Kelly herself has explained, in unmistakable terms, why disclosure can carry a price. (The Daily Beast)
That is what makes her treatment of Jane Doe feel hypocritical. Kelly once asked audiences to recognize that conduct after harassment does not fit a neat script. She explained that she continued to have a professional relationship with Ailes for years, and she rejected the idea that this later relationship disproved what she said had happened. Yet she now treats Jane Doe’s timing, conduct, drinking, sexual choices, and later reactions as material for a narrative about why the alleged assault may have been consensual. Kelly demanded room for the messy reality of her own experience. Jane Doe is receiving far less room from her. (ABC News)
There is another line Kelly crossed that has little to do with evidentiary skepticism: appearance. Whether Jane Doe is conventionally attractive has zero bearing on whether she consented to a sexual act, whether she had the capacity to consent at a given moment, or whether an act exceeded the boundaries of prior consent. A woman does not become more likely to consent to multiple people simply from receiving attention she may find flattering. Turning Jane Doe’s body into evidence is not skepticism. It is humiliation dressed up as psychological analysis.
Kelly’s comments about alcohol create a similar problem. She said Jane Doe made the decision to drink and to arrive at a fraternity house late at night. Those choices can be facts in a timeline, but they are not substitutes for the consent questions at the center of the litigation and renewed criminal investigation. Going to a fraternity house is not blanket consent. Drinking is not blanket consent. Prior consensual sexual activity is not blanket consent. A serious discussion can examine disputed evidence without reviving the old cultural script that asks what a woman drank, wore, wanted, or expected before asking what other people did. (AP News)
None of this means the seven accused men should be presumed criminally guilty. They deny wrongdoing, no criminal convictions have been entered, and the civil allegations remain contested. Due process is not the enemy of a complainant’s dignity. It is entirely possible to insist on fair proceedings for the accused and refuse to degrade the person making the allegation. Kelly presents those positions as if respect for one side requires contempt for the other, and that false choice has produced some of her ugliest commentary. (The Daily Beast)
The irony sharpened when Kelly told Olivia Rodrigo to “shut up and stick to singing” after Rodrigo publicly supported Jane Doe. Kelly has built a career on the premise that prominent people may speak forcefully about public controversies. Telling another woman to stay in her professional lane when she expresses an opinion Kelly dislikes is a strange defense of open debate. It reads less like a demand for factual rigor and more like an attempt to police which women are permitted to speak. (EW.com)
Megyn Kelly does not have to believe every allegation. She does not have to agree with Jane Doe’s interpretation of every event, and she does not have to endorse every public campaign surrounding the Cornell case. What she should know, perhaps better than many commentators, is that reporting sexual misconduct can be frightening, delayed, imperfect, and professionally or personally costly. She once asked the public to make room for that reality in her own story. Her refusal to extend the same basic humanity to Jane Doe is what makes this episode so difficult to defend. (ABC News)
