How much money is Megyn Kelly going to get to just fuck off and disappear for a while?
It’s been exactly one month since Megyn Kelly, big ol’ smile plastered to her face, took a machete to her own television hosting career, casually asking a panel on her Today show block what the big deal was about white people using blackface in their Halloween costumes. Despite a hasty apology, Kelly was unable to save her Today mini-show—which she was both terrible at, and reportedly hated anyway—as her “colleagues” at NBC News took multiple shots at her “Hey, is this racist?” questioning, and the network itself expressed its dismay at her comments, ultimately pulling her off the air. Now there’s just one question remaining about her tenure at NBC News: How hard is it going to have to rain, money-wise, for Megyn Kelly to just fuck off and go away?
A lot, as it turns out: Several outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, have reported that NBC News has apparently decided it wants Kelly gone as quietly possible, and is thus expected to pay out the rest of her three-year contract, a.k.a. an additional $30 million. That number may or may not be especially annoying for you, dear reader, depending on how much you’ve paid over the course of your life to not ask why it’s bad for white college students to run around “dressed up like” Diana Ross.
And yet, despite the fact that everyone involved, including the ousted host, would like to pay Megyn Kelly to just go away, the process is still dragging on. (Apparently “the paperwork” is still “going back and forth,” presumably because everyone involved keeps writing notes to each other asking whether they’re all trapped in some sort of hellish simulation of the modern media environment.) The deal is expected to finish next week, at which point—this being 2018 and all—Kelly is expected to take herself and her 30 million new friends to the Time Out Corner for a year or so, and then return to TV, because fuck, what else is she going to do? It’s not clear where yet, though; her old pals at Fox News have made it clear it probably won’t be with them.