On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone discusses how Megyn Kelly is “softening” Epstein's crimes
Published
Citation
From the November 13, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Let me show you guys something that is bubbling online. Megyn Kelly, who has a huge following, and I think we've all talked about her. She sometimes says interesting things about ICE and Jeffrey Epstein. And today, she said a fascinating thing about pedophiles.
This is Megyn Kelly on her own, very popular podcast. She said this, "I know somebody very close to this case. Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile. He was into the barely legal type, like, he liked 15-year-old girls. He wasn't into, like, eight-year-old girls. There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a five-year-old."
I'm not sure what to do with this, but I do think it's important to point out, having interviewed as many of the victims as I have, that a 15-year-old is not barely legal. She is illegal. She is a child. Federal child sex trafficking laws consider that the crime of child sex trafficking. So is a 16-year-old. So is a 17-year-old. So liking barely legal is like Megyn Kelly today calling Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile. Angelo, what is -- what seems like this could be construed as is Megyn Kelly softening her massive audience for something really bad in the Epstein files about Donald Trump when it comes to, quote, "barely legal."
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean -- Yeah. That's right. I think, you know, she should go to Truth AI, right, and ask it its question and she'll get an honest answer here, which is that 15 or five, you're still a pedophile. It's still bad. And I think you're right. I think that's what she's doing for her audience. She's softening it. And in the rest of that segment, she -- you could tell she was clearly trying to soften the ground and anticipate things.
She then went on to defend Trump explicitly because she said, you know, and there's never been, you know, any claims about Donald Trump doing anything or being interested in younger age women. And, you know, he owned a miss teen pageant. Surely, something would have come up. And there was the report about him going backstage, but there weren't any reports about him doing anything inappropriate. So, even as she was trying to pull the thread on that, which is where that was going, you know, that lead up to Jeffrey Epstein was to, again, try to soften him a little bit because of the relationship.
But she closed by making the point about Trump and his ownership of a teen pageant. And she was trying to explain that surely he would have had every opportunity to pursue people of that age with the pageant, but he didn't, so that's how you know it's not a thing. And then she sort of moved on to the next topic, and that juxtaposition was very weird, but certainly purposeful. And I think there's a reason why the rest of the right wing media, as these reports were initially unfolding, this leaked all these emails, didn't say anything about it until much later in the day when the White House finally started to engage on it. They were waiting. This is what happens when you dive in, like Megyn Kelly did. It comes out very disturbing.