On today's show, Megyn Kelly is joined by her good friend and former co-worker, Tara Reid, who talks about her time at NBC's Meet the Press and how she got her start as a reporter. She also talks about the Joe Biden scandal, and why she thinks he should be fired from the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
00:06:37.000People think I'm, like, this raging bitch because, you know, they see me doing a cable news primetime show talking to politicians, and that's not, like, a rosy walk in the park, but my normal personality is totally charming.
00:07:10.000So that, but that doesn't mean that I'm not a happy, kind person.
00:07:13.000It's just not an appropriate really demeanor for primetime cable news.
00:07:17.000Well, I asked because, obviously, we've had interactions before, because we both worked at other networks, and you were always pleasant when I would see you, and the cameras would stop rolling, and you'd go, oh, okay, that was fun.
00:07:28.000Whereas I had had other people who the cameras stopped rolling, and I was like, get the hell out of here, kid.
00:07:32.000So I just want to make sure that there isn't a slow burn.
00:07:38.000You see all the news coming out now about Ellen, right?
00:07:40.000It's like all these stories about how she's really nasty behind the scenes or, you know, she just wasn't nice to guests or she wasn't nice to her crew, whatever.
00:07:47.000And I feel like I'm exactly the opposite.
00:07:49.000People say that I'm like this sort of ice queen, but you'll never find any crew member I work with who would ever say anything bad about me.
00:07:55.000Like, I treat the people I work with really well.
00:09:12.000And I asked what he, he said, I want to **** you.
00:09:20.000And he said it low and I was pushing away.
00:09:23.000And then he pulled back immediately when he could see I wasn't complying.
00:09:26.000I was obviously just tensed up and frozen and not kissing him back and I'm not going with him.
00:09:31.000And he pulled back and he looked at me and he said, come on man, I heard you liked me.
00:09:38.000Now I want to be clear, again it's allegedly, and Joe Biden has claimed that he doesn't remember having lunch, so we don't know what's what right now.
00:09:49.000Because obviously this is a huge story, and you had this scoop.
00:09:53.000Did she just feel like you were going to be fair-minded?
00:09:57.000Like, I later found out that she'd been trying to reach me for a couple of weeks and had asked a number of journalists who had reached out to her, do you have a contact for Megyn Kelly?
00:10:07.000And surprisingly was told, no, never heard of her.
00:10:10.000We don't have any way of reaching her.
00:10:22.000Anyway, after, like, a month of watching people ignore this story, it was just such bullshit, because you cannot believe Tara Reade.
00:10:29.000I have no stake in whether people believe her or don't believe her, but the coverage of her story versus the Trump accusers versus Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh, I mean, like, the difference is just so glaring.
00:11:47.000How does the New York Times accidentally dox a social security number?
00:11:51.000It's not like they left one portion of her address there and someone, you know, like, with, he will not divide a Shia LaBeouf, they tracked the smoke signals.
00:11:58.000Like, you just, you just released your social security number.
00:12:03.000In their defense, it was like a picture of an ID card that they took a picture that happened to have the social security number on it.
00:13:44.000Like, I thought that I asked for a mirror that makes me look slimmer, and I punched the mirror when I found out it was just a normal mirror.
00:13:51.000So, let me ask you this, though, about Tara Reade.
00:13:54.000Before we move into her specifics, and by the way, please do tell me if I ask any specifics, because I'm not a lawyer, what I can ask, what I can't on that front.
00:14:01.000But as someone who's obviously been in the media, and you've covered this type of story with the Me Too movement for a long time, and I think you've been pretty fair-minded about it, and like you just said, you've been a victim of it yourself, how do you balance No, I think that's baloney.
00:15:51.000And if you paid attention to the facts of that case, as opposed to just going with the woke line of the woman must be telling the truth, the three privileged white guys at Duke must be lying.
00:16:17.000And my general feeling is that in most stories, that's the case.
00:16:21.000Well, I think it's the case for people like you, but you are an anomaly in the sense that the rest of the media basically crucified these people in the court of public opinion.
00:16:29.000It took a while for that to come out, like Mattress Girl, UVA, right?
00:18:25.000So my point is simply, it's so unfair to just choose a side and say women always tell the truth and guys are the liars and the perpetrators.
00:18:52.000Because if Tara Reade went to, you know, let's say Gloria Allred, people would go, okay, all right, well, we get it, and immediately would be questioned, and then, of course, people who would question it would be accused of being sexist.
00:19:01.000In your case, I think she said, okay, I need to go someone who has been calling balls and strikes.
00:19:06.000I wanted to ask you this because you mentioned Christine Blasey Ford.
00:19:10.000We caught a lot of fleck because nothing really matched up.
00:19:15.000What do you see as the primary differences?
00:19:17.000Because some people will say, well, you're just politicking at this point between Ford and Reed, if there are them.
00:19:24.000What I say is night and day is the way the media is approaching the stories.
00:19:30.000They put Christine Blasey Ford on the cover of Time Magazine as a heroine.
00:19:35.000Tara Reade couldn't get anybody to even put her on television after months of trying to come out with this story.
00:19:43.000When I was at NBC, my limited stint at NBC, Not only did they put Julie Swetnick, that liar, in my opinion, in the Brett Kavanaugh case on TV.
00:20:06.000It was like at least two or three links up here saying one anonymous person said to another anonymous person who spoke to NBC that Brett Kavanaugh, like 20 years ago, might have pushed a woman up against a wall.
00:20:17.000Somehow, somebody figured out who the person was who started this chain link and tracked down the alleged girlfriend you threw against the wall, who's now a federal judge.
00:20:37.000So it's like, To me, just the media double standard and the double standard of the women who were like these feminist crusaders when it was Brett Kavanaugh on the hot seat.
00:20:48.000And now we're like, there's plenty of reasons to disbelieve Tara Reade.
00:20:53.000But there were plenty of reasons to disbelieve Blasey Ford.
00:20:55.000You just chose not to because it was a different guy who was being accused.
00:20:59.000Well, I think the primary difference, and then I would like to get your take, because you sat down with her, the primary difference is, not that there are reasons to disbelieve Tara Reade and Christine Blasey Ford, there are no reasons, as far as verifiable evidence, to believe Christine Blasey Ford's story.
00:21:11.000Every time she came out and said this happened, someone came out and said, well, no, we actually can't corroborate that, and quite a bit could be proven the opposite.
00:21:18.000And also, right now, when you have Christine, sorry, not Christine Blasey Ford, when you have Reade saying, well, I think you should search through these files, and they're being sealed, and Joe Biden says, I won't release them, whereas Cavanaugh came in with his journal that could be corroborated with.
00:21:51.000And, by the way, there's no footage of Cavanaugh sniffing children repeatedly.
00:21:57.000Well, I mean, the thing is, with Blasey Ford, people found it so persuasive that she told the therapist about it all these years later.
00:22:04.000It's like, well, you know what, Christy?
00:22:06.000Tara Reade has a very credible, professional woman who was at Ted Kennedy's office when they met, who she told about contemporaneously with the alleged event.
00:22:15.000And that woman says, Tara's been telling the same story for 27 years.
00:22:19.000She's got another woman who she told the story to two years later, who's a Democrat, who's going to vote for Joe Biden, who says Tara's been telling the same story for 27 years.
00:22:27.000Now, does that mean the story is true?
00:22:38.000But in terms of supporting evidence, she's definitely got more witnesses than Blasey Ford ever did.
00:22:44.000And it also matters when you're talking about motive, because she was talking about it back then, where she had really nothing to gain other than speaking the truth with friends, and not saying that's why Christine Blasey came forward, but, you know... Let me speak that one out, okay?
00:24:07.000I don't know if that would make sense.
00:24:09.000I think the thing that would make sense more is if she's lying, there's something wrong.
00:24:15.000Right, or there's a possibility... Something's wrong with her.
00:24:17.000At least she told the friends not a long time ago.
00:24:19.000Yes, and there is also the possibility that something happened that isn't as severe as she's saying now.
00:24:25.000In other words, she could have been listing a complaint because he just, you know, sniffed her, rubbed her shoulders, or said, uh, nice breasts like he said with other women, which, you know, are on the record.
00:24:33.000Or, can I get a minute alone with her for a minute?
00:24:34.000Which, listen, I don't know, that's not rape, I need to be clear, but I do have women who work in this office, and if I were to say, can I have a minute alone with you for a minute, and sniff, for example, too cute Maddie, you would all kick my ass promptly.
00:24:48.000It would be like a pig pen, just a pile of dust.
00:24:51.000So, to me, that's bad enough, and maybe that's what happened with Terry.
00:24:56.000Can you say- Well, and to your point earlier, though, the sexual harassment stuff, when she said, find the complaint, And there was recently a news report about the fact that her now ex-husband, he had said in a filing in 1996, my wife was sexually harassed in the office of Joe Biden.
00:25:10.000But there is a distinction between harassment and assault.
00:25:12.000I think she's got plenty of documentation that she accused him of harassment at the time.
00:25:19.000But that's different from the assault she's now claiming.
00:25:23.000But her two corroborating witnesses, the two best ones she has, they say she told them about the alleged assault, the penetration, the whole thing, right from the time it happened with the one woman's case and two years later in the other woman's case.
00:25:37.000Where do you, since you're closer to this obviously, where do you think this goes?
00:25:53.000I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they've got genuine doubts about Tara Reade and they don't want to go too far out on the limb in case she turns out not to be a truth teller.
00:26:02.000But whatever the motivation is, it dies without media interest.
00:26:06.000And the only other way it would stay alive, I think, is if other women with similarly severe allegations came forward.
00:26:31.000We don't lump them into the same category.
00:26:33.000That being said, when you compare Aziz Ansari to Sniffing underage people to making people uncomfortable and inappropriate touching and invading space after being told about it.
00:26:47.000It would seem like the media would say it's a different standard is what is what I don't think the seven women who came forward with the sniffing and the touching of the neck, those reports a year ago, April of 19, that's not going to be enough.
00:27:02.000He effectively handled that with a tweet that was like, you know, I'm sort of a politician, I'm handsy, I get it, that was yesteryear, I'm over it.
00:27:42.000They're stuck between a rock and a hard place, I think, a lot of people, people who aren't consistent here, you know, on this.
00:27:45.000And I do think it comes down to burden of proof.
00:27:47.000And certainly when it relates to Tara Reade, I think it's more comparable to, let's say, Christine Blasey Ford.
00:27:53.000As a non-lawyer, it seems like there's a lot more to go on and there's different treatment of that.
00:27:57.000I don't know if you've been following recently, you know, we ran into this.
00:27:59.000I'm not a journalist and unfortunately, unfortunately as a commentary in the state of modern journalism, I've broken some stories that you would think these folks wanted.
00:28:08.000Remember the lady who drank the fish tank cleaner, chloroquine, that little thing?
00:28:12.000So we actually had some exclusive info.
00:28:17.000I want to get your opinion on that, but we actually had the exclusive documents that we released on this show.
00:28:22.000What we didn't have that wasn't exclusive, but was available to the public, but hadn't been reported, was that she was a longtime Democratic donor.
00:28:31.000We had an exclusive social media post of her saying, I can't believe you would believe Trump.
00:28:37.000And then, what we had the exclusive to was, there was a John Deere court case, I think, where she sued John Deere, and using some information in that file, we found one where she was charged with domestic abuse against her husband, and we had exclusive documents that we revealed.
00:28:53.000We call him Reg, and it's crazy that we were able to find this.
00:28:57.000We released it, and no one covered it on the left, and then I called the reporter who broke it at NBC, and I said, listen, You reported a story where she drank fish tank cleaner with her husband.
00:29:07.000Her husband died, and you guys must have known that she was a Democratic donor.
00:29:11.000You said she drank it because of Donald Trump.
00:32:18.000Like, why does CNN have to do it, right?
00:32:20.000Like, I have a lot of friends over there who I really like and respect, but I feel like the decision came from the top that they were going to get Trump, that they were going to be part of the resistance media, and maybe that their objective approach wasn't working financially.
00:32:34.000But to me, like, that's been a real loss in journalism, because I, for me, actually...
00:32:42.000I no longer have a place I can go where I believe I'm just going to get facts and not spin.
00:34:08.000Well, I mean, the one thing I don't want to do in whatever I do next, and I haven't figured that out yet, I'm kind of enjoying myself at the moment, but I'll get back out there in some capacity, is I don't want to work for some corporate overlord.
00:34:19.000You know, I don't want to be told how to cover the news or feel like I must cover it in a certain way.
00:34:23.000And I can see sort of as more people pop up with power, you know, online, digitally, whatever.
00:35:08.000Because one could easily feed the other, but I don't think they understand this medium, and I think it's only recently that they're even taking it seriously.
00:35:15.000That is a problem, obviously, because now they're a little bit late to the party.
00:35:19.000And unfortunately, they have far more dollars, and so they're trying to change the landscape.
00:35:22.000I think something that's changed, and if I'm not mistaken, maybe Anthony Cumia talked about this, I don't know that it's original, is we always had to deal with the FCC, right?
00:35:31.000It was a bit of a game, cat and mouse, like, oh, you can say, oh, that guy's a – I don't
00:35:35.000know if you could say that guy's a shithead, but you can't use it scatologically.
00:35:38.000We knew the rules and you try and dance up to the line.
00:35:42.000But we knew who we were engaging with.
00:35:44.000Now we thought there would be no gatekeepers online.
00:36:29.000Just like small people who really don't have enough to worry about and really just want to tear down others who don't have the same opinions as they do.