- Megyn Kelly spoke at Business Insider's IGNITION conference on Wednesday.
- She spoke about the feud she had with President Donald Trump.
- She said the lowest point was when her daughter asked her what a "bimbo" meant, a word used toward Kelly in tweets, which Trump retweeted.
On Wednesday, Megyn Kelly, host of the NBC morning show "Megyn Kelly Today," spoke at Business Insider's IGNITION conference and addressed a wide range of topics with Business Insider's US editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. But one of the most powerful moments was when Kelly looked back on her feud with Donald Trump during the presidential election — specifically, how it affected her family.
At the time one of the major faces of Fox News, Kelly never backed down from Trump's attempts to intimidate her when they would talk. Things then escalated when Kelly called out Trump's disrespectful language toward women at the Republicain debate she moderated.
But Kelly said the worst moment was when her then 5-year-old daughter, Yardley, asked her one day what the word bimbo means. At the time, Trump had been retweeting people referring to Kelly by using that word.
"The Yardley moment was maybe the lowest moment of all, or one of the lowest moments," Kelly told Shontell on stage at IGNITION. "We didn’t share with our kids at all any of this nonsense because they have enough to worry about than presidential politics and certainly anything involving me and the possible president."
Kelly said what was most devastating about her daughter asking the question was that she had recently taken Yardley on a mother-daughter trip.
"I had taken her with me to the Fortune Most Powerful Women’s Conference and she said to me on the train ride down, 'What is this thing we’re going to?' And I said this is a conference that talks about really powerful women who have done great things and celebrates them. And she looked at me and said, 'Are we two of them?' I thought about the loss that my child had suffered without even knowing it. Going from thinking that she, 4 or 5 at the time, was a Fortune Most Powerful Woman to asking me what a bimbo is."
Kelly was interviewed mere hours after NBC announced that longtime "Today" host Matt Lauer had been fired for "inappropriate sexual behavior" at work. Kelly said at IGNITION that she had heard rumors, but regardless, the latest takedown of a powerful man makes her believe we're currently in a moment where the era of women being "nice" to men in the workplace to get ahead is over, and it's time to be treated as equals.
"Every time a man — whether it is our president or a news anchor — demeans or diminishes a woman by grabbing her a-- or talking about her body or coming onto her instead of asking for her ideas and treating her as a professional in the workplace, they lose something too," she said. "It’s not a small matter, it’s a huge deal. And it’s been happening systemically for far too long. I feel like this is the first moment we’re starting to think maybe it doesn’t have to keep happening, maybe we won’t have to be the 'nice' women and girls we’ve been raised to be. That is what is prized among women and young girls: 'niceness.' Go along to get along. Don’t cause waves. Enough of that. Enough of that."
Watch Kelly's comments below:
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