Megyn Kelly mused on Wednesday about whether “pedophile” was really the right word for a man who “liked 15-year-old girls.”The Megyn Kelly Show/YouTube
Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.
There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know 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.”
Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. 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.”
Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…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. [Bondi has] 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.”
“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, 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.”
“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.
“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In fact, we don’t know.
The comments read as something of a shift for Kelly. Back in 2023, she lashed out against Republicans who were defending British comedian and right-wing darling Russell Brand against rape allegations from three adult women and one minor. (Brand was charged with five counts of rape and assault in the UK earlier this year and pled not guilty. He has denied the allegations.)
“You’re 31 years old and you have sex allegedly over a three-month period with a 16-year old?” Kelly said of the allegation against Brand by the minor. “We’re done. I’m unsubscribing. And I am sick of conservatives online trying to defend that as though she had a role in it. She was a minor. Just because you can’t be prosecuted for it doesn’t mean it’s right.”
Kelly has also railed against grooming by convicted pedophiles such as ex-Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, whose victims reportedly ranged from 6 to 17 years old. And she has condemned what she has called “the exploitative and predatory nature of the entertainment industry for minors.” (Kelly has also, of course, used the term “grooming” in the baseless, homophobic and transphobic way that many right-wingers do, to describe activities like drag—which does not remotely constitute grooming.)
Epstein’s victims have described the abuse they sustained as derailing their lives, despite the fact that they were, in Kelly’s view, “very young teen types” as opposed to five-year-olds. Take Marina Lacerda, an immigrant from Brazil, who—as I wrote back in September—described how the abuse affected her education at a Capitol Hill press conference back in September:
Lacerda recounted entering Epstein’s orbit while working three jobs to support her mother and sister as a high school student, and a friend offered her $300 to give a man, presumably Epstein, a massage. “It went from a dream job,” she said, “to the worst nightmare.”
Lacerda said she started getting called upon to go to Epstein’s house so frequently that she dropped out of ninth grade and never returned. Her only way out, she said, came when Epstein told her she had gotten too old to work for him.
Kelly’s comments came the same day that the House Oversight Committee released another 20,000 pages of records, provided by Epstein’s estate, including emails in which Epstein called President Donald Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and said he “knew about the girls as he asked [co-conspirator] Ghislane [Maxwell] to stop,” as my colleague Inae Oh wrote. (White House officials claimed that the emails in fact proved Trump’s innocence and called them a “distraction” from the government shutdown.)
In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Elisa Batista, a campaign director at UltraViolet Action, an advocacy group against sex abuse, called Kelly’s comments “reckless and irresponsible.”
“Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile. Full stop,” Batista said. “A middle-aged man grooming and sexually exploiting 15-year-old girls is child abuse. Full stop.”
Lawyers for several of Epstein’s victims did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday afternoon.
