Megyn Kelly at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. (Getty)
Megyn Kelly is officially leaving Fox News and joining NBC News, the network announced today.
Kelly will host a new daytime show on NBC Mondays through Fridays, as well as a Sunday evening show. She will also “become an important contributor to NBC’s breaking news coverage as well as the network’s political and special events coverage,” according to NBC’s press release.
Following the announcement, Kelly wrote on her Facebook page, “While I will greatly miss my colleagues at Fox, I am delighted to be joining the NBC News family and taking on a new challenge.”
Kelly’s time slow has not yet been reveleaed, but she has stated in the past that scheduling is an issue for her, as she said in November that “the current schedule I’m on is not ideal for a mother of young children.”
Here’s everything you need to know about Megyn Kelly’s family.
1. Her Husband Is Douglas Brunt, a Novelist
Megyn Kelly’s husband is Douglas Brunt, a 45-year-old novelist from Philadelphia. Brunt wrote the book Ghosts of Manhattan, which takes a look at life on Wall Street from the perspective of an unhappy insider whose job is ruining his personal life. There is also a blonde female reporter character in the book, and Megyn Kelly made very clear on Fox News that this character is not based on her.
Brunt’s second book was The Means, which follows two presidential candidates and a female lawyer-turned-journalist who is covering the campaign (Megyn Kelly happens to be a lawyer turned journalist who covers presidential campaigns).
In October 2012, Kelly interviewed Douglas Brunt about his book Ghosts of Manhattan, telling viewers that Brunt is her husband and that she is very proud of him. She also said that Brunt wrote most of the book while she was on maternity leave, and she was the first person to read it.
“I had the first read, which I have to tell the viewers was terrifying because I had no idea whether Douglas could write. When I married him, he was the CEO of a company…I’m thinking to myself, ‘What if it stinks? What am I going to say?'”
Luckily for Kelly, she says that she thought the book was “awesome.”
Kelly and Brunt met on a blind date in 2006, which was set up by a mutual friend.
“A woman I knew e-mailed me to say that she wanted to fix me up with a colleague of hers,” Kelly writes in her book Settle For More. “They’d been flying somewhere and were watching me on Fox News from their seats. She saw that he liked me. He’s reserved, but she saw it.”
In an interview with Humans of New York, Brunt said that his first date with Kelly took place while she was being stalked and was being protected by security 24 hours a day. Brunt said, “Our first date went great. It was the kind of night that was clearly going to end with a kiss. But I had to kiss her in front of the security guards. It was awkward. It was like our parents were watching.
According to The New York Times, Brunt proposed to Kelly not long after she was transferred to New York and was made an anchor of “America’s Newsroom.” He proposed on a beach in Beach Haven, N.J. Brunt and Kelly were married on March 1, 2008, in Huntington, New York.
2. She Has Three Children
My job is important to me, but it’s dwarfed by my love for my children. #SettleForMore t.co/RlRX45pnjv
Megyn Kelly and Douglas Brunt have three children together, two sons and one daughter.
Kelly gave birth to Edward Yates Brunt on September 25, 2009, according to People. He goes by “Yates” and was named after his two grandparents. Kelly and Brunt’s next child was a girl, Yardley Evans Brunt; she was born on April 14, 2011, according to People. Finally, their youngest child is Thatcher Bray Brunt, born on July 23, 2013, according to US Magazine.
“People say Yates is my twin, but I think he’s a mini Doug,” Kelly writes in Settle For More. “He came into this world a sweet old soul and he remains that way to this moment.”
Later in the book, Kelly describes Yardley as a strong ball of fire who “could have negotiated a better Iran deal than John Kerry did,” and Thatcher as “easy and lovely and happy from day one.”
In a 2014 interview with People, Kelly said that her kids have no idea that she’s a celebrity or that she appears on television every night.
“I don’t think they know I’m actually on TV for a living,” Kelly said. “But my husband recently came on the show to talk about his new novel, so we showed them that segment because it was Mommy and Daddy. They reacted as if they had never seen me on television before, running up to the screen and waving.”
3. She Was Previously Married to Daniel Kendall, an Anesthesiologist
Daniel Kendall, Megyn Kelly’s ex-husband, is an anesthesiologist. (Yelp)
Before meeting Douglas Brunt, Megyn Kelly was married to Daniel Kendall, an anesthesiologist. They married in 2001 and divorced in 2006.
For some time there was speculation that Kendall had cheated on Kelly, sparked by a comment Kelly made on air that she had been betrayed in the past but that the person who betrayed her wasn’t her current husband. In response, Douglas Brunt spoke to The Daily Mail to say he was completely faithful to Kelly.
“When she made that comment about it not being in her current marriage it irritated me a bit because it seemed like she was suggesting it was me,” Kendall said. “I texted her at the time and she apologized. I think I was a good husband.”
Kendall actually appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show in 2011; he was interviewed as an expert during a segment about the death of Michael Jackson.
“Joining us now is an expert witness [who] is, in fact, an anesthesiologist by the name of Dr. Dan Kendall from our D.C. bureau who – I confess the judge has a conflict of interest since the judge used to be married to Dr. Kendall,” Kelly jokingly said, referring to herself as the judge. “But Dr. Kendall is now happily married to another person, as am I, so there is no conflict of interest.”
4. She Has a Sister, Suzanne, and a Brother, Pete
Megyn Kelly appears at a TIME Magazine gala. (Getty)
Megyn Kelly has two siblings: Pete and Suzanne, who are five and six years older than her respectively.
In her book, Settle For More, Kelly says that she and her brother Pete argued quite a bit when they were children, and their parents always had to intervene to resolve the conflict.
“Today, Pete and I are great friends, but, growing up, we tested each other,” she writes. “I like to think that he helped toughen me up, and that I learned to give as good as I got.”
Meanwhile, Kelly says that she had a great relationship with her sister Suzanne as a child, recalling a story in which a teacher wouldn’t let her take home the class stuffed bear because she threw up on the floor, and so Suzanne went to the mall to buy an exact replica of that bear.
“God, how I loved that bear,” Kelly writes. “And I loved Suzanne for giving it to me.”
5. She Says Her Mother, Linda Kelly, Was Tough on Her Growing Up
Megyn Kelly was born on November 18, 1970, in Syracuse, New York to Edward and Linda Kelly. She says that part of the reason she developed a strong backbone is because her parents were extremely critical of her. While speaking with Katie Couric in 2015, Kelly explained that her parents rarely praised her and even sometimes insulted her.
“It gave me the greatest gift, which is self-awareness,” Kelly said, according to Elite Daily. “I never grew up thinking everything I did was awesome. But if I did something that was good, I believed the praise… because it was so infrequent.”
Kelly makes this same point in Settle For More; in fact, the first chapter is titled “No False Praise.”
“My family raised me in upstate New York with the core message: Be whoever you are,” Kelly writes. “That person may (or may not) be extraoridinary. We’re not going to lie to make you feel better, but we’ll love you no matter what. In our house, it wasn’t ‘You are special.’ It was more like ‘You don’t seem that special so far, but we don’t care.'”
This evidently continues to this very day. During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Kelly said her mom continues to critique her, but she has now developed a system with her mom in which for every insult her mom gives her, she gets to give one back.
Kelly’s mom lives in Albany, New York. Her father, Edward Kelly, died of a heart attack at the age of 45, when Kelly was 15 years old. Years later, Kelly’s mother remarried. Kelly’s stepfather is Peter Kirwan, who Linda Kelly met in a support group for widowers; Peter’s wife had died of brain cancer. Kelly has three step-siblings: Paul, Patrick, and Liza.