Megyn Kelly's Sick Defense of Epstein is Not New
As pundits express outrage over Megyn Kelly's sick defense of sex-trafficker pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, her history of whitewashing sex crimes against children cannot be separated from her politics.
Megyn Kelly is leading the way out of the Trump-Epstein problem for conservatives by claiming that actually, raping and having sex with trafficked victims is not illegal if they are above puberty and hey, um, Epstein is actually not really a pedophile, according to her.
Sadly, this sick defense of the abuse and rape of children is not new for Kelly.
In 2015, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly was chosen as the right person to interview the Duggar family — they were at the time very successful propagandists for right-wing Christianity with their TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting — after In Touch published a 2006 police report that began with an anonymous tipster informing the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline and producers of The Oprah Winfrey Show, alleging that their eldest son Josh Duggar molested four of his younger sisters and a babysitter between 2002-2003.
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Kelly was criticized after her 2015 Duggar interviews for allowing the Duggars to shift blame from their son Josh’s actions to the media —a tactic that has been working for conservatives for decades and Donald Trump has taken to the point where now he can be in the Epstein files as having spent private time with a victim at Epstein’s house and having known about the sex trafficking and not reporting it and his press secretary blames the media and Democrats.
Further criticism was that the alleged victims/daughters appeared to be coached by their parents on how to answer questions. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar even thanked Kelly “for telling our story,” as if that were her job.
“It seemed to be pretty much about helping the Duggars salvage their brand rather than getting to the bottom of what happened in this family,” NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans told TheWrap at the time. “She wasn’t particularly incisive and she didn’t push the Duggars on issues that I think are at the heart of this — why they waited so long to go to law enforcement, why they took all these unofficial avenues to get their children help.”
If Kelly’s goal was to tell their story, the story of the parents who appear to have allowed and enabled their own daughters to be abused under their roof, and she took that task and passed it off as a hard-hitting interview, then her real goal was to help cover up alleged abuse of children.
I wrote about her interview at the time for PoliticusUSA, very troubled with how the victims had been railroaded and used on national TV, a double victimization.
And now, Kelly is out in these streets in 2025 telling people that actually, having sex with a trafficked 15-year-old does not a pedophile make.
Now that Trump is all over the Epstein emails, Kelly tries to run that maybe Epstein is not really a pedophile:
“YouTube and Sirius XM host Megyn Kelly took a detour to riff about how deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein might not fit the definition of ‘an actual pedophile’,” Mediaite reported.
MEGYN KELLY: As for Epstein, I’ve said this before, but just as a reminder, 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–
BATYA UNGAR-SARGON: (RAISES EYEBROW) Mmm!
MEGYN KELLY: This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type.
BATYA UNGAR-SARGON: Mmm-hmmm.
MEGYN KELLY: Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.
And that is what I believed, and that is 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.
BATYA UNGAR-SARGON: Or anything else.
MEGYN KELLY: Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. 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, you know?
Outrage ensued.
On Thursday night’s edition of CNN’s Laura Coates Live, Coates and Finney blasted Kelly over her comments, with Finney accusing Kelly of trying to create a “permission structure,” Mediaite reported Friday morning.
Karen Finney thought this might be because Megyn knows nothing about the subject, but then shouldn’t Megyn have researched it when she did the infamous Duggar interview in 2015? And many of us left blood in the streets after Roe was overturned getting the Right to comprehend that the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio was a rape victim automatically because a 10 year old cannot consent.
This topic is not new and the Republican defense of abusers is not new.
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