Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin says a summer feud with Megyn Kelly left her in tears and out significant money, after Kelly falsely claimed on her show that Baldwin had slept with four men.
Baldwin, 47, laid out the toll in a new Substack post, writing that what hurt most was seeing another woman publicly misrepresent her personal choices.
“While I was in it — that horrible weekend this summer and the days after — my tears in private weren’t really about me. They were about that. That a woman did this. Falsely. Publicly. Slut-shamed me.”
Baldwin said defending herself against the claim came with a real financial cost.
“Her lie kept multiplying — a lie about choices with my own body that I never even made. And it cost me tens of thousands of dollars to defend a version of myself that never existed.”
Baldwin did not specify what the expenses were for.
How the dispute started
The disagreement traces back to July, when Kelly used a segment of “The Megyn Kelly Show” to discuss a candid Substack post in which Baldwin had written about dating, sex, and four men she’d had the opportunity to sleep with. Kelly told her audience that Baldwin’s “work and her mission include banging four men in a month.”
But Baldwin’s original post said she turned down all four. “What did I do?” she wrote at the time. “Turned them all down. Every. Single. One.”
Baldwin’s post did not shy away from the subject of sex generally. “And y’all know… I love sex. If I may be so bold, I’m pretty damn good at it,” she wrote, adding that casual sex was “very much on the table” and that she had “thought about it. A lot,” even though she was choosing to abstain during that period of her life.
Kelly later admitted that she and her team had not read the full post, which sat behind a paywall.
“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 s–t about Brooke Baldwin, to be honest? And in the paid pieces of the article, she confesses she actually did not have casual sex with these men!”
Baldwin responded publicly at the time, accusing Kelly of failing “Journalism 101” by spreading a false claim that then spread further across other platforms and outlets. “My last Substack was not about me having casual sex. It was about me choosing not to,” she wrote in July.
Baldwin also wrote that some women, faced with another woman’s success, “instead of lighting a torch, do the opposite,” and accused Kelly of trying to “snuff someone else’s out.”
She has not softened her stance since. “I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’ve arrived at some Hallmark kumbaya bulls–t ending where I’ve found compassion for her,” Baldwin wrote. “I haven’t. I’m not there. Maybe I never will be, and I’m not apologizing for that.”
A separate family dispute
Earlier this month, Baldwin also alleged that her estranged father, Steve Baldwin, repeatedly struck her with a belt when she was a child, describing “full-body panic” as she waited to be punished. “One time, I got belted so many times I woke up black and blue on my backside,” she wrote.
Steve Baldwin disputed the account when contacted by the Daily Mail. “For 40 years, no member of my family has mentioned this alleged incident to me. I have no recollection of it ever having taken place,” he said. “All I can say is that I love my daughter unconditionally, and I always will.”
Brooke Baldwin stood by her account in a follow-up statement: “I remember it like it was yesterday. I know what happened to me, and I stand by every word I wrote.”
The New York Post, which first reported on the Kelly dispute, said it had sought comment from Baldwin and representatives for Kelly.
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