Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin is reportedly pushing back against Megyn Kelly after the podcast host made inaccurate claims about Baldwin’s personal life during a discussion with the hosts of the “manosphere” podcast Ruthless, with Baldwin accusing Kelly of abandoning basic journalistic standards.
The dispute began after Kelly discussed Baldwin’s recent Substack post and podcast, telling the Ruthless co-hosts that Baldwin had once been a “serious news anchor” but now had shifted her focus.
“Her work and her mission include banging four men in a month,” Kelly said during the conversation.
Kelly’s comments referred to Baldwin’s recent post discussing casual sex. However, according to Baldwin’s published account, she did not engage in casual relationships despite receiving multiple propositions.
In the post, Baldwin made that point explicitly.
“Turned them all down,” she wrote. “Every. Single. One.”
On Sunday, Baldwin responded in a new episode, arguing that Kelly had completely misrepresented the substance of her original post.
“My last Substack was not about me having casual sex. It was about me choosing not to,” Baldwin wrote. “It was about heartbreak. Discipline. Discernment. Protecting my energy while I build something bigger than myself.”
Baldwin said Kelly devoted nearly nine minutes to discussing a version of events that she says was false.
“And yet, for nearly nine minutes, Megyn framed an entire discussion around a false account of my sex life and my bodily choices, alongside three men who cackled, laughed, and berated me,” Baldwin wrote.
She also argued that the inaccurate claims reached a wide audience because Kelly distributed the discussion across multiple platforms.
“In addition to her millions of YouTube subscribers, [Kelly] also posted it to her many other social media and podcast accounts, and broadcast on SiriusXM,” Baldwin wrote.
She continued by criticizing other media organizations that repeated the claims without reviewing her original writing.
“And these lies were clipped, posted, and syndicated by other outlets with comparable audiences of their own; other journalists, editors, and media teams also never bothered to read my original Substack or check with the original source; me,” Baldwin wrote.
Kelly later addressed the controversy during Thursday’s episode of her own podcast, acknowledging that she and her team had not read Baldwin’s complete Substack post before discussing it.
“Brooke Baldwin was CNN anchor for over 10 years, we played some of this yesterday, in which she — she has a Substack now in which she’s bragging about casual sex, and how she had the opportunity to sleep with four men this past month,” Kelly said.
She then explained that the full article presented a different account.
“Well, as it turns out, we should have paid to read the rest of her stupid Substack, which we didn’t, because, who gives a sh*t about Brooke Baldwin, to be honest?” Kelly said. “And in the paid pieces of the article, she confesses she actually did not have casual sex with these men! It was all just a teaser to get you to pay to listen to her lame recitations about her life.”
Baldwin also responded to Kelly’s follow-up comments, arguing that the admission only reinforced her criticism.
“She did another nine-minute segment defaming me,” Baldwin wrote.
She said Kelly’s acknowledgment that she had not read the full Substack before making the original claims amounted to a failure to meet fundamental reporting standards.
“Even if I were to believe she didn’t read my full piece, this is an admission that failed to satisfy the most basic standards of journalism,” Baldwin wrote. “Talk about a reckless disregard for the truth.”
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