Meghan McCain ripped Megyn Kelly for “scraping the bottom of the barrel” for content.
McCain blasted the SiriusXM host for her comments about Lena Dunham and Demi Moore, which she called “ugly” and “hateful,” in a rant about her former FOX News colleague on Friday. “One thing that gets me really, really, really upset in general is body-shaming. I don’t like it,” said McCain, 41, on her podcast, Citizen McCain.
She added, addressing Kelly, “Honestly, find better content. If you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel talking about women’s bodies, there’s a lot going on in the world.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Megyn Kelly for comment.
“I’ve been fat-shamed my entire career, literally since I emerged on any kind of public forum in any way,” McCain went on, adding, “My heart was really breaking watching these clips” of Kelly’s harsh comments, “because I think it’s an indicator of where we’re going back to.”
“We are not fans of Megyn Kelly,” McCain declared.
During her post-Met Gala meltdown, Kelly, 55, commented on the appearance of Girls creator Lena Dunham, whom she described as “homely” and having ”gained more weight” during her time away from the public eye.
“She’s got calves that look like thighs,” Kelly said, adding, “She’s the one leaning into her obesity. And we’re just being subjected to it.”
Kelly also criticized actress Demi Moore for her appearance on the Cannes Film Festival red carpet shortly after. “She’s shockingly thin. She looks truly anorexic,” Kelly said. “She looks like a Holocaust victim. Forgive me, but I mean it’s just barely any muscle.”
“I can’t imagine why anybody would want to listen to that for entertainment,” added McCain’s co-host, Miranda Wilkins. “Totally agree,” McCain said. “There’s a lot more to life than how you look.”
McCain lamented that she didn’t “know what body was acceptable” to Kelly, with whom she briefly overlapped when they both worked as on-air personalities on Fox News in 2016 and early 2017.
“Both of these women are being body-shamed, one for being too thin and one for being too fat,” she said. “This is how women exist in the world. We are either fat-shamed or thin-shamed, and there’s really nothing in between.”
McCain, who has spoken out about hearing comments about her weight, has called out other former FOX News colleagues over the years, including Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, whose comments she credits with helping her build resilience.
“I have two daughters, you have two daughters,” she said, gesturing to her co-host. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to raise them in a culture that we’re going to go back to this. We are not going back to this.”
“Megyn Kelly has a teenage daughter, does she not?” Wilkins said. “She’s got teenage children, and I’m very curious to see how she talks about people in the home and how that affects her family.”
In 2018, Kelly herself admitted that she had asked her stepfather to fat-shame her whenever she wanted to eat.
“Some of us want to be shamed!” Kelly said on Megyn Kelly Today. “When I was in law school, I was gaining weight. I said to my stepfather, ‘If you see me going into that kitchen one more time, you say, ‘Where you going, fat a--?’ And it works!”
McCain responded in a tweet at the time, “I was publicly fat shamed early on in my career, and it sent me to therapy. Trust me, there are real-life ramifications for fat shaming of any kind, it is NEVER acceptable. We should be fostering a healthy culture that celebrates all women of all sizes.”
McCain, who now says she simply “can’t be bullied” about her body, noted that Kelly should lead with concern rather than scorn.
“One thing that we should have all learned from Chadwick Boseman is sometimes when people look skinny, they may be having health issues,” McCain said of Moore. “We need to be very careful about how we talk about people.”
This is just the latest time McCain has gone after Kelly over remarks she made on her show. She also called her out in November, when Kelly echoed a “source” that said convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was “not a pedophile” because “he wasn’t into, like, eight-year-olds.” McCain called the comments “disgusting.”
“Why are we having a conversation about what is okay or more socially acceptable when it comes to pedophilia?” McCain added at the time. “I just don’t understand the point of this conversation other than to rile up, offend, get people upset.”
