Megyn Kelly is not among the women who have pledged to support famous NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw after Variety and the Washington Post released reports of his alleged sexual harassment of former correspondent Linda Vester.
On Monday’s segment of “Megyn Kelly Today,” Kelly played devil’s advocate with two fellow NBC employees, Kate Snow and Stephanie Gosk, who presented Brokaw’s statement denying Vester’s claims that he tried to forcibly kiss her and grope her. Snow also cited a petition in support of Brokaw circulating within NBC. As Variety previously reported, more than 60 current and former NBC employees have signed the letter, including Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, and Mika Brzezinski.
In response to the signatories who have vouched for Brokaw’s professionalism, Kelly said, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” calling their claims “character references.” She did clarify, however, that she personally has not had any negative experiences with Brokaw.
“And that’s not in any way to impugn Tom, who I love and who’s been so good to me,” Kelly added.
Vester’s alleged claims against Brokaw are the latest in the #MeToo era, in which multiple women have detailed enduring inappropriate behavior by their male colleagues. Kelly began working for NBC after leaving Fox News in early 2017. During the segment, she referenced her own experience defending her claims that Roger Ailes sexually harassed her at Fox, noting the similar way in which others called her story into speculation. However, she added that her own experiences with Ailes and with Brokaw are not similar.
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“Gretchen Carlson filed her lawsuit against Roger [Ailes], and then I called Lachlan Murdoch to tell him what had happened to me 10 years earlier, because I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just an internal investigation, that it was a full and fair investigation into his conduct, and they hired Paul Weiss,” she said, referencing the outside firm hired to investigate the claims. “When I came out and talked about it publicly, the news anchors would ask me, ‘Why didn’t you report it?’ I finally found the right response, which was, ‘You don’t get to ask me that question until you ask me first whether there was a safe avenue for reporting in my company, and only if the answer to that is yes, you get to ask question number two.’”