The Real Reason Megyn Kelly Turned Down A Job At CNN

Megyn Kelly's name has been in the headlines for reasons that have been good, bad, and even downright ugly. In 2015, Kelly got unwanted attention when then-presidential hopeful Donald Trump suggested she had "blood coming out of her wherever" after a hotly contested Republican debate, per CNN. This came after Kelly questioned Trump about calling females "fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals." In 2020, Kelly told the Daily Caller that she absolutely stood by her line of questioning at the time. She said, "Like, Trump deserved that question because what I was trying to ask him was, 'This is what the Democrats are going to hit you with. How are you going to respond?' And I was 100% right, they did hit him with that. Over and over and over and over."

Yet, even with the reported animosity between Kelly and Trump, the former Fox News host actually backed his supporters soon after President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. When podcaster Jon Favreau tweeted to Kelly that he thought she was "truly pathetic," she shot back with, "You have zero understanding of the mood of 70 million Americans who have been unfairly attacked relentlessly for the past four years as awful ppl just for supporting their president." Even though Kelly identifies as an independent, and not as a Republican, she recently explained why she turned down an offer that would have created a huge shift in her audience base.

According to Variety, Megyn Kelly came out in 2015 as neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but as an Independent instead. But soon after she left Fox News in 2017, Kelly said she didn't want to abandon her fan base by heading over to left-leaning CNN despite getting a "huge" offer from the network. During an interview with conservative Buck Sexton, Kelly explained why she declined her offer from CNN. Kelly said, "I said no, Buck, because I knew: Who is my fanbase going to be over there? I knew who my fans were and I knew that my Fox viewers were not going to follow me to CNN and that the CNN viewers were going to hate my guts," per the New York Post.

It turned out that Kelly took an offer with NBC instead. However, the network cut ties with her in 2019 after comments she made about wearing Blackface to a Halloween party. Kelly was also plagued with low ratings when she took over the third hour of "TODAY," per The New York Times. Despite her controversy and struggles in the ratings department, Kelly told Business Insider in 2021 that moving to NBC "wasn't intellectually stimulating." She added that what worked for her at Fox News didn't work for her at NBC and that she "overcorrected at NBC by going too soft." That, or maybe her fan base decided not to make the network jump with her, after all.