Megyn Kelly is the next high-profile media personality to enter the podcasting space.
First reported by The Wall Street Journal, Kelly’s Devil May Care Media is slated to release the first episode of The Megyn Kelly Show at the end of the month.
“The No. 1 thing I wanted to do was control my own editorial,” Kelly told WSJ. “To not be doing anyone else’s bidding, not having the pressure of corporate overlords over me, that means one has to be entrepreneurial.”
Kelly said the format will evolve over time, but early episodes will last under an hour, and air a few times per week.
While The Megyn Kelly Show is to be the sole podcast to start with, Kelly said she’d eventually like to produce shows from other hosts.
Production company Red Seat Ventures will produce the show and help connect with advertisers. The podcast will be free to listeners and broadly distributed on services such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Kelly, who is funding the venture herself, departed NBC News in January 2019. She left with the remaining $25-30 million of a three-year, $69 million deal she signed with NBC News after leaving Fox News in January 2017. Her departure from NBC News came more than two months after the network decided to cancel her 9 a.m. show Megyn Kelly Today in light of her on-air remark that she did not understand why the use of blackface on Halloween was inappropriate. The remark drew criticism both on social media and from colleagues at the network, including mainstay Al Roker. Kelly issued a heartfelt apology on-air the following morning, but it was not good enough for NBC News management, and her program was taken off the air, Friday, Oct. 26.
Kelly has been keeping busy since departing NBC, building up content on her social media platforms. In May, she conducted an interview with Tara Reade—the former Joe Biden staffer who accused the Democratic Party candidate for president of sexually harassing her in the 1990s—and posted the conversation on her official Instagram and YouTube pages.
In November of last year, Kelly interviewed the former ABC producer who was fired by CBS for allegedly leaking the ABC Amy Robach hot mic interview, where the 20/20 anchor is heard saying she was upset that ABC News had killed her Jeffrey Epstein story.
Kelly told the Journal that podcasting offers the chance to tackle any issue in a way she hopes will be respectful, if at times irreverent.
“I don’t want the political pressures of working for someone who’s dedicated to taking down Trump or defending him. I don’t want pressure to not say the right thing because it’s going to tick off one group or another,” she said. “You can’t criticize Black Lives Matter because it’s going to upset some corporate sponsor. You can’t have an honest conversation about transgender rights without upsetting one group or another. I don’t want to live like that and I don’t think most Americans want to live like that.”
Before her high-profile arrival at NBC in January 2017, Kelly spent 12 years at Fox News, joining FNC in 2004 as a Washington-based correspondent before ascending to the role of 9 p.m. host of The Kelly File, which she helped create. When Kelly left Fox News, The Kelly File had been the No. 1 cable news program among the critical 25-54 demo audience, and the second-most-watched show on all of cable news (behind The O’Reilly Factor).