Geraldo Rivera thinks Megyn Kelly’s comments about blackface were “grotesque” and “indefensible in many ways,” but he also believes his former colleague got “the short end of the stick.”
“You know, people make mistakes. Good people occasionally can do a bad thing,” Rivera, the host of the new Reelz series Murder in the Family, told Us Weekly exclusively on Thursday, October 25. “She said something stupid, but she didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings. She was just telling the truth about how she was raised and how things were back in the day.”
A source confirmed to Us that Kelly, who debuted Megyn Kelly Today in September 2017, was “forced out by management” after she defended blackface Halloween costumes.
“What is racist?” Kelly said on-air on Tuesday, October 23. “You truly do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on white face … That was OK when I was a kid, as long as you were dressing like a character.”
Kelly later apologized in an email to her coworkers and to her audience on-air.
Watch the video above for more from Rivera about Kelly — including if she has a future at Fox News after the controversy.