The Megyn Kelly Show - Janice Dean on Cuomo, Ailes and Friendship | Ep. 24
Episode Date: November 13, 2020Megyn Kelly is joined by Janice Dean, Fox News meteorologist, and author of "Mostly Sunny," to talk about Andrew Cuomo and Dean's COVID crusade, Roger Ailes and Fox News, their longtime friendship, Do...n Imus, the TV news business, complications from surgery and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everybody, it's Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, Janice Dean,
meteorologist at Fox News and one of my best and closest friends in the world. She's an amazing person. And though she be, but the
meteorologist, she is fierce. She is taking on New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in a big way. And
she's really the only one trying to hold this guy to account for his disastrous order that nursing
homes in this state take on COVID positive patients. After that, over 6,000 people died in the New York State nursing homes.
And sadly, Janice's in-laws were two of them.
We have a long history, she and I.
We're going to talk about COVID, Cuomo, the media, our time together at Fox.
And for the first time, she and I will get the chance to talk publicly about the fall of Roger Ailes, which is a discussion I've been long waiting to have with her in this kind of forum.
So I hope you'll listen and appreciate the moment you were about to have.
I don't know, the profound experience I just had with her.
Hope you enjoy it. But first, before we get to that, let's get you fired up for what's about
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off your first month of the coffee club. And now Janice Dean. Joining me now, one of my closest
friends on earth, Janice Dean. JD, so happy you're here. Oh my gosh, Megan, I am so excited for you.
This is amazing.
Oh, thank you.
You've been so supportive of the whole adventure and of everything in my life.
So it's funny because I'm having you on.
Yes, we have an amazing friendship and we've been through a lot together, much of which has made news.
But you're, you know, you're back in the news and you've become this warrior, which we're
going to get to in a minute when it comes to COVID and Cuomo.
But I just want the audience to understand how we know each other.
So we both worked at Fox News. You're still there.
You're the meteorologist. And I think I was thinking like,
when did she and I become friends? And what you tell me what you remember.
I remember seeing you at the social security office when we were both changing our names
after we had both gotten married in like 2008.
Correct.
I actually, I think it was the DMV because I was getting, it was the DMV in Manhattan
because I was getting my name changed to Newman.
And I remember you saying to me, because you're so quick and funny,
you said, okay, Janice Dean, the weather machine. So you're going to be Janice Newman, the weather
woman. Remember that? Do you remember that? You're so smart. And I was like, oh my gosh,
this woman has to be my best friend. And then we made it happen. You,
I always laugh when people underestimate you because they don't, they don't know you.
Remember when you first started to take on the Cuomo thing and really started to,
you're like the only one, you're only the only reason anybody's talking about what Governor
Cuomo did with COVID and Soledad O'Brien, who might be the nastiest person on Twitter.
I mean,
she's definitely top three.
She's gotten very,
very bitter in her post CNN time was like,
oh,
the meteorologist was in like,
oh,
like stupid meteorologist.
Why are we listening to the stupid?
And I was like,
yeah,
you know what?
The meteorologist,
she's so sweet. She wrote the book The meteorologist, she's so sweet.
She wrote the book Mostly Sunny and she's so positive and she's going to kill if you
hurt her or hurt her relatives or issue an order that happened to lead to the deaths
of 6,000 people, including her relatives.
So you know what, Ms. O'Brien?
She gets an opinion.
And that's what I love about you is like you pick
your battles. You don't know you're not not out there fighting every day, but you're strong on
Twitter, which I love. You pick your battles and I've yet to see you lose one of them.
Well, I don't love it. I don't love being that you mentioned mostly sunny and I've tried to
maintain that kind of attitude for most of my career. And
I actually enjoy being the meteorologist because I don't have to weigh in on politics. I've done
news before. I did it early on in my career and weather's wonderful. I always say the only red
and blue that I see on a map are areas of high pressure and low pressure. And I love keeping it that way.
I love being out with the crowds pre-COVID, hugging people, having them be on television
with me and delivering a forecast for Fox and Friends. It really, truly is the greatest job
I've ever had. So to find myself in this weird situation of going after the governor of New York, I don't love it. And I do hope that at some point we get
some answers and accountability so I can be that Janice, mostly sunny Dean that you see on
television again. I find it quite hard. I don't know if I have the thickest of skin, but I will
tell you, and I've said this to you before, all of the things that have led up to this moment of taking on the governor of New York, I believe, have helped me with this.
I know we're going to talk about Roger Ailes. I know we're going to talk about Imus. Throughout my broadcasting career, I've had very powerful men that have told me, no, you can't do something. You just sit there, little meteorologist girl.
And because I've gone through situations where I have taken on powerful people
for the right reasons, I believe that has given me the building blocks to where I am today, where I am going after this governor.
And I'm just going to continue to, you know, cry from the mountaintop as long as long as it takes
for people to realize what this man did, because I want accountability and I want answers.
This it it's thanks to you that anybody's even focusing on this.
Stu Bergeer of The Blaze said, and this is a quote, it's quite possible Cuomo would be getting away with this if not for the efforts of people like Janice Dean.
So let's let's fill the audience in on what we're talking about. And Governor Cuomo here in New York may become even more relevant to your life soon, because if Joe Biden takes the oath of office on January 20th, he's talked about, they've talked about, they've floated his name as possible attorney term or two to ascend to the presidency, something his father, Mario Cuomo, who was beloved here in New York for many years, was never quite able to do.
So you need to know about him. And honestly,, if if he were a Republican, he would have been run out of office. You know how many how many examinations and investigations we'd be having into his conduct. So we're going to walk through it a bit now. All right. So let's start with Janice is married to Sean, a firefighter and counterterrorism expert.
And they have two little boys, Matthew and Theodore. And Sean's parents, Mickey and Dee, Mickey was also a firefighter, married 59 years.
They lived up until the spring in a fourth floor walk up in Brooklyn for nearly 60 years.
And then they got sick.
You take it from there.
Right. And this is something that I am very compassionate about. Middle-aged people who are wondering what to do with their ailing parents. Sean struggled for months on what to do with his
parents. As you mentioned, they lived in a four-story walk up in Brooklyn for almost 60 years.
It was rent controlled.
We could not get them out.
And they were very adamant about that.
They didn't want to move anywhere for many years.
No one wants to leave a rent controlled apartment.
No one.
Of course not.
But when they start getting older and they're having problems walking and getting down the steps, you know, then it's time to try to figure out what we're going to do. And they were really adamant they didn't want to move out of their apartment, even if we helped, you know, find an apartment that was on the ground level close to where we were. It just it just got to the point where Sean couldn't ask them anymore. They weren't going to do it. But then they got started. They started getting sicker. His dad had dementia.
He there were regular trips to the ER.
Sean was running from our place on Long Island to Brooklyn to take him to the hospital.
His sister was doing the same thing.
His mom was also could not walk, had back problems, had problems walking and even getting
out of a chair was difficult.
Yeah, they needed care.
They needed 24-hour care.
And so Sean spent a lot of time looking for a place.
The plan was we were going to have them in a really nice assisted living residence that
was very close to where we are on Long Island.
We had a double room waiting for them.
We loved the staff.
It was bright.
It was sunny. Dee loved the staff. It was bright. It was sunny.
Dee loved the people around her.
It was the most social she's ever been in her entire life because she was in this four-story
walk-up in Brooklyn for so many years.
And his father needed rehab.
So he was in a nursing home temporarily to get better because he had a lot of urinary
tract infections.
It was just, you know, we needed him better to get him into the assisted living residence. And then COVID happened and his
dad died quickly. He died at the end of March and Sean got a call on a Saturday morning and we had
no idea. We were in quarantine, right? We weren't able to see them. The eyes and ears were the people at their elder care facilities. We couldn't physically be there to see them. We didn't know his dad was sick at all. We got a call on a Saturday morning that said his dad wasn't feeling well. He was running a fever. And three hours later, we get a call saying he's dead. And we did not know he died of COVID until the death certificate.
And we were told he ever told you. Nope. No one ever told us to this day. I don't know
how he was tested. Uh, how, you know, at what stage he was tested after he died. We're not,
we're not clear on that, but I do remember Megan getting a call before he died and Sean being on
the phone from the people who worked at the nursing home saying, we're going to move your father to a different floor because we're bringing new patients in. And at the time, I didn't think anything of it. Yeah. were out there about Cuomo's mandate to put COVID positive patients into nursing homes.
That's when my back went up and I went, Hmm, okay. I'm going to, I'm going to remember that his mom died two weeks later, uh, in the assist. She got COVID in her assisted living residence.
We brought her to the hospital. We were afraid to bring her to the hospital. We thought she was
going to get COVID in the hospital because we just thought she wasn't feeling well. Gets to the hospital. They diagnose her with COVID.
She dies maybe two days later. And because she died in the hospital, her number does not count
as an elder care facility death of COVID because she died in the hospital. And that's another
reason why I have a
problem with this governor is he will not release the total number of seniors that got COVID in
their elder care facilities, but died in the hospital. And those numbers are probably double
what he's reporting his, his health department. And no one's making him release those. So we know it was over 6,000
seniors who died in the nursing homes. And I mean, the number that's very similar is
over 6,000 COVID positive patients who were moved into nursing homes.
And yet we don't know that third number, which is how many died in hospitals having, you know, contracted covid and being shifted out to the hospital because they were that ill.
And how can he get away with not telling us?
I mean, all these numbers should be public.
How does he keep it secret?
That's a very good question.
And one of the reasons why I'm so vocal, he's actually being sued or his health department is being sued by Empire Center, which is, you know, a watchdog of sorts.
Bill Hammond, I've gotten to know him. I've gotten to know a lot of New York lawmakers through all of this and some of the journalists out there.
He's suing them for the information. And we were supposed to know the total number.
The health commissioner, Howard Zucker, said he was going to have it after the election.
Ha!
Have those numbers after the election.
But wait.
Oh, no, we don't have those numbers.
You're going to have to wait till sometime in January.
So, yeah, they're getting away with it.
He's getting away with murder right now. Well, maybe he's going to keep it under wraps until he gets a tap on the shoulder to possibly join the cabinet.
And then there's going to be another reason to delay.
Because if you're right, if the numbers are double and now you're talking as many
as 20,000 people dead potentially because he thought it was a good idea to sign an order
saying that nursing homes had to accept COVID positive patients. They could not turn them away. And new patients coming in could not be
tested for COVID. Right, JD? That second piece of it is equally egregious.
Very important, that second piece that you could not test them. You could not,
what's the word? You had to take, you, you had to take these patients regardless
of whether or not they had COVID. So that's, so that was in place for 46 days,
46 days. And Sean did not want me to go out there and talk about this at all. You know,
him, he's very quiet. I'm surprised he married me.
Me too.
Right? He's a very quiet, like doesn't want anybody broadcasting anything.
He doesn't like the spotlight.
He does not. He supports my career, of course. But we had many discussions about this because when I was reading about the March 25th order, the executive order by Cuomo that was in place for 46 days to put
COVID positive patients into nursing homes. When we saw him on TV, never being asked about the
mandate, instead joking with his brother on CNN with a giant cotton swab, you know, about the
governor getting his COVID test, it made me furious. And I was in touch with
Tucker Carlson throughout the whole, you know, Tucker very well. And we both talked to him off
air. We're good friends. And I was telling him this and Tucker said, Janice, whenever you want
to come on my show, I will give you a platform. Because I was saying to him, why aren't people
asking him about this crazy order? Why are they letting him get away with this and not asking him these important questions?
Thousands of families, thousands of families deserve answers.
And this is not a political thing.
This is not Republican or Democrat.
He's tried to dismiss your criticism as political, spoken like a true politician who knows absolutely nothing about you.
I don't think in all the time we've been together, you've ever taken a political position. You're
Canadian. You know, it's like, he doesn't know you're not a political person. You're an upset,
grieving family member. Like everyone is. I have met hundreds of grieving families.
None of us ask each other who they voted for.
And Mickey and Dee, by the way, were registered Democrats.
How about that?
You know, shouldn't we investigate this situation?
What if it was 6,000 children, Megan?
What if it was double that that had died because of an order?
What if the governor had put COVID patients into schools?
This would be the lead story in every newspaper, on every television station. If he had a Republican,
if he was a registered Republican and not a Democrat, he would definitely.
He was also out there touting his love for seniors, you know, Matilda's Law on March 20th of this past year. And we're going to protect seniors in nursing homes, he said. We're going to protect the seniors in nursing homes. The news was calling him America's governor. And then he signed this order, which I know it's like a death trap. I mean, it's...
It is. It's like a death trap. I mean, it's. How were they supposed to survive the most vulnerable among us with covid positive patients being put into their facilities as they were being warned?
Most of these homes don't have private rooms. These covid positive patients are going to be too close to the other already vulnerable seniors. That's the thing about
a JD that drives me the most insane is he knew the risk the nursing homes told him there was a,
there was a statement by the, um, society for post-acute and long-term care medicine saying
care is a quote caring for COVID-19 positive residents is unsafe and jeopardizes all patients in the nursing home.
They said forcing these admissions may have dire and fatal consequences.
And he didn't listen.
And now he's out there celebrating himself and his leadership during the crisis.
I couldn't believe when I heard he was writing a book
in the middle of a pandemic.
What governor in the middle of a pandemic
could write a book about this?
And then he goes on the TV shows and said,
well, it's halftime.
No, it's not halftime.
There are 30,000 dead New Yorkers.
Get to work.
You should be writing condolence cards instead of writing a
book. And now the numbers are going up here in New York and he continues to go on his victory lap.
It is, it's insane to me. And you know what he's, when he does finally get asked the question,
Megan, when someone finally says, what about that nursing home order?
You know, March 25th, COVID positive patients into nursing homes. You know, what about that?
He'll blame everyone. Like you said, politics. It's the New York Post. It's Fox News. He's
blamed God. He's blamed Mother Nature. He's blamed the nursing home workers that he's blamed
the visitors. P.S. We never got to
visit our loved ones. We never got to visit them. We didn't have funerals. We didn't have last
rites. We weren't able to have wakes. We buried them. So we weren't able to go visit them. And
finally, there was one time where he said, oh, old people, they're going to die. I mean, it's
insane, Megan. You could I mean, I want a super cut of all these excuses,
except the man that signed the mandate for 46 days to put COVID patients into nursing homes,
that man is Andrew Cuomo. And by the way, if you go to the New York healthcare website,
it's not there. It's been scrubbed. That order has been scrubbed.
What do you mean, the mandate?
Yes, it's gone. You can't find it on the
Internet. Nope. He he's given a total pass on this by the press. And I know he went on The View to
promote his new book, by the way, his book. I mean, I kid you not. It is called American Crisis
Leadership Lessons from the covid-19. I mean, that's he's actually calling himself a leader and touting his leadership on this problem.
Meanwhile, New York state is number one for deaths in the nation. It depends on who you ask. The New York Health Department says it's almost 26000 dead in New York. Johns Hopkins says it's more like 33000. But they're being a little unclear with the numbers. So we don't know, but we know we're number one in deaths. And this guy's
got the nerve to go out there and write a book about how to lead during COVID. Honestly, I think
it's because when he gave those weekly and daily briefings, he had a calm manner and his manner of
speaking was sort of soothing. I don't know. He sort of projected like, oh, I'm getting the whole truth. And it's sort of a good warning for people just because someone has a good manner
or maybe in Trump's case, a bad manner doesn't mean you can tell anything about the truth or
falsity of the of what's going to come next, of what they're actually saying, because he's been
lying about this order and whether he signed it and whether he understood it. He's just he he's first he said it never happened. He said it never happened, Janice. I he gets all huffy, like, how dare you ask me about this order?
That's a tell of deception.
He actually said to a guy, a reporter in the Finger Lakes, he said, how cruel of you to ask me of that.
Like seriously? He said that seriously?
He did. And here it is. I think that you tell yourself a lie
so many times he starts to believe it. And he has been revered in New York for so long,
or he hasn't been asked tough questions because you can tell no one has said, Hey,
here's your answer. Stick to it. Instead, he has a different answer every single time. And the problem is you're right.
No mainstream media will ask him or follow up on the question and say,
okay, really? Well, here's the order and it does have your name on it.
And follow up with the warnings that he was given. Like Natalie, yes, you absolutely did sign the
order. I have it right here. And B, you knew the risks. Cite some of those things I just cited, you know,
Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine. Like you were told that this was
going to have dire and fatal consequences and you did it anyway. Why did you do that?
No, we have one clip from The View. This is Sunny Hostin, who, I mean, this is weak sauce, but she she was like,
how about that covid thing in that nursing home order? And here's what he said.
The conspiracy they're trying to to spread just has no factual basis. But yes, people in nursing
homes died and they're playing politics with the issue, which I think is especially cruel. Here he goes again.
Conspiracy.
It's a conspiracy.
And also his percentages are wrong because we don't have the total number of seniors that got COVID and died in the hospital.
So he is giving false information all over the place.
And Sonny with her, you know, didn't even follow up.
They just gave him a pass.
And by the way, before she asked him the nursing
home question, it was like, I love this book so much. It's so awesome. So how on earth am I,
we supposed to take these people seriously? Honestly, Megan, I just, I, you know what
governor Cuomo come on Megan Kelly show. I dare you, Mr. Tough guy, instead of going on with Howard Stern and, you know, and and just love life and
nonsense and my leadership book, take some hard questions. Show me you're a leader. Show me you
are the governor of the you know, your greatest state that has lost over 30,000 people to covid.
That's right. Show me how tough you are. You're always telling us how tough you
are. You know, there's a saying, the seven foot center doesn't tell you how tall he is.
The tough guy doesn't tell you how tough he is. He doesn't have to, you know. And the fact that
he keeps running around saying how tough he is, is a real tell on what a weakling he is.
Janice and I were joking, like, it'd be great if he would come here and I would sit across from him
at the table and ask him my tough question. And then she would just jump out of the closet like, aha. And another thing. Okay, but Governor Cuomo, I promise we won't actually do that to you. But since you're so tough, I'm sure you can handle it. But I would love to ask him those tough questions. If you're really tough and you're really smart and you really have nothing to hide, the truth is, is your ally. You you want to be asked the tough questions. Bring it on. Yeah. Let's talk about it because I
I didn't do what you're saying I did. Oh, and yesterday, of course, he was talking about how
he would have liked to punch out Donald Trump, you know, like, really, really? That's what that's
what you're focused on. Yeah, because he called because he calls Chris Cuomo the brother of the
governor. You know, the the CNN anchor is Chris Cuomo and the New York state governor is Andrew Cuomo.
And Andrew Cuomo is telling Howard Stern he would like to punch out Donald Trump because he insulted my family because we call every everyone calls Chris Cuomo Fredo because he is definitely the Fredo of the Cuomo family.
I mean, sorry, the truth hurts.
Apparently, that's racist if you call him that. Well, I'm half
Italian, so I'm going to say it. Isn't that how this works? Oh, my God. It's also why I can say
the term paddy wagon. I'm half half Irish on the other half, which I found out the hard way on Fox
News is also considered a slur because it's not P.A.D.D.Y. It's P.A.D.D.Y. from like rounding up
all the drunken paddies and taking them away. But I can speak on behalf of Irish people. We don't give his name? J Jeff Foxworthy. You might be a
redneck. It's a whole routine. So now it's just like, you might be a racist if you say this,
you know, it's like everything have some orange juice racist. Oh no. We were just talking about
this with Matt Taibbi again yesterday. Who's, um, we were talking about white fragility,
this ridiculous book by Robin DiAngelo. And it premise is, if you're a white person who's friends with a black person and you're just having a good time and you're just loving them and enjoying their friendship and you are not thinking about skin color, you're a racist.
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Can I just go through because I was looking at this guy, Stu Bergier at The Blaze.
He did a great timeline of Governor Cuomo and like all the crap that President Trump got for allegedly mishandling COVID, which really kind of led to his problems in this election.
You know, if you look at the number one issue for the majority of voters, it was COVID and the people for whom that was an issue voted against him.
He did like a little timeline on Cuomo. And I just,
I did a couple of bullets. I'm just going to read for the audience. So you understand
this is what happened from the guy who's just published a book being touted by the media
on leadership lessons in handling COVID. Okay. Three, two, March 2nd. He says,
New Yorkers are worrying too much about this.
3-4, March 4th.
The pandemic is being caused by fear.
3-6.
More people are dying from the flu than from COVID.
Remember how that was awful to say?
Well, he said it.
March 8th.
Go on the subway.
March 9th. This fear is unwarranted.
March 11th.
His brother, Chris Cuomo, after a six-year ban in interviewing his brother, is now allowed
to interview him. And it's a joke. No hard questions. March 12th. There's not going to be any quarantine.
March 18th. There's not going to be a quarantine. There is not going to be a shelter in place order
for New York. March 19th. No shutdown is coming. March 20th. New York is shutting down. Literally
the day after he said no shutdown is coming it happened and it came three days after
he slammed new york city uh mayor uh bill de blasio for even suggesting that there would be
a shutdown and as stew points out it's very hard to be on the wrong end of an argument with mayor
de blasio but governor cuomo found a way to do it um okay then march 24th once again with chris
cuomo yucking it up about how funny and funny and, you know, so much levity.
It's such a good time. The very next day he issues that order that that you could easily make the case directly led to over 6000 deaths of seniors.
March 29th, that's when the people were jumping up and down saying this is dangerous. This is dangerous. He didn't listen. And now he's out there celebrating himself as the media enables his being anointed as this politic, America's governor, perhaps a cabinet member, perhaps even a president. It's gross. I'm going to continue to try to do what I can from my little beautiful Twitter feed.
And, you know, I'm grateful for your support and I'm grateful for Stu's support and I'm grateful for Fox News and I'm grateful for Tucker.
And it was finally when Sean realized that this governor was getting away with murder that he said, I think you need to say something.
And that's when I went on Tucker's show mid-May, I believe, and started talking about it.
And so I'm grateful for the media outlets that have the interest and and are reporting the story.
But there's not there's not enough.
And yet CNN has the nerve to call Fox News state TV.
Where's your coverage of this? You should be bending over backwards
to be on these stories, given your obvious conflict of interest and the total impropriety
of letting Chris Cuomo interview his brother so many times now over a very important and scary,
deadly issue. They should be humiliated. I mean, if anything, they should be beating up on him
more, not less. They don't touch it. They don't touch it.
They don't. And I've actually gone after some of the anchors on CNN and MSNBC when they've had the governor on afterwards via Twitter and said, oh, how about that nursing home question? You must
have run out of time. And they've gotten angry. Well, we asked him this, this and this bullet
points. And, you know, I just said, you know what? Good on you. But the most important thing right now for New Yorkers or many of us is the fact that have either verbally told me or direct messaged me or texted me saying, keep going, J.D. Good job.
But yet.
Well, there's something else, though.
I won't say the name.
I know this story because of our friendship.
But somebody in a position of power reached out to you to give you a warning.
It wasn't on behalf of Governor Cuomo.
It was a friend who's in a position to understand Governor Cuomo's character.
And do you want to share what the warning was?
Yeah, the warning was, and this person does know the family very well.
They said, good job.
You are, you know, you're fighting for a good cause.
Watch your back, watch your back. So he, you know, listen, he's, he's got, I've said this
many times. I'll go, I go out to rallies as well with all of these families who have situations
like ours that have lost loved ones. And I feel like I don't know
these people, but they're part of my family. We're like COVID orphans, right? And he's got the power.
He's got the name, the Cuomo name. He's got the Democrats on his side. But you know what?
We've got the angels on our side. And I just want people to know,
we're talking about Sean's parents, Sean Newman. He's an American
hero. This is a guy who was a firefighter on nine 11 JD can cite the facts better than I can, but he,
he was off that day, right? Right. It was too late and spent the next
several months digging out through the rubble, the remains of his friends, his buddies and others who
had been working in the in those buildings at great risk to himself. That's that's John Newman.
OK, and then devoted the rest of his life to counterterrorism work, to running into more burning buildings to save people. So screw you, Andrew Cuomo, for not having the decency to answer his questions about his dead parents. the frontline worker right there. You know, there were some articles recently about, you know,
all of these anchors that are working extra hours, you know, because of the election and they got
like three hours of sleep and oh my goodness, they're doing such amazing work. And I'm like,
yeah, I'm married to a firefighter who basically, you know, that is his whole 23 year career is not
getting enough sleep. Cause you know, he's actually going in to try to save people.
So save me your nonsense about the pretty anchors on television.
I'm one of those anchors. I get it.
I do hurricane coverage, but I'm not on there going, oh, I haven't slept in three days because of Hurricane so-and-so, you know? Oh, well, this reminds me, this reminds me of a great comment you made
when the designer Stella McCartney was singing,
what's his name?
Joaquin Phoenix's praises after the Oscars.
And he had gotten up there and made a speech about how like,
I don't know, we're not supposed to be drinking cow milk anymore.
And there's all sorts of things he's in favor of.
And fine, I have no problem with him
supporting those causes. But she wanted us to stand up and clap for Joaquin Phoenix
for wearing the same suit to the Oscars and the Emmys, like his personal effort to save the world.
And I was like, this is ridiculous. You mean he acted like a normal human and wore something twice?
And you were like, oh, and here's a picture of my husband in his suit that he wears every day, too.
It's like Sean in his fireman's outfit.
Get a grip.
Right.
With soot on it for like 10 years of going into fires.
These people are so out of touch, Janice.
They're so out of touch, Janice. They're so out of touch. They don't like, they're drunk on their own wine,
celebrating themselves
with like the news anchors
and the Hollywood people.
Can we talk about Fox?
Yes.
People always ask me
what it was like to work there, right?
Because I was there for 13 and a half years.
And I was like,
stressful, fun, high wire,
bizarre, unpredictable.
It was definitely much more of a family than I felt any place else I worked.
That's for sure.
Much more of a close family, but also like a really dysfunctional family, you know, not
perfectly healthy.
There could be some therapy.
I would say it was better for me when I was not at the top,
you know, on the way up was easier.
And I just wonder, what do you think?
Do I have it right?
You do.
You know, listen, when Roger Ailes hired me 17 years ago,
he didn't ask me who I voted for.
He saw somebody that was a go-getter,
that wanted to get into television and get away from a bad
job that I was currently in. And from then on, I had mostly great experiences there. Barring the
stuff I know we're going to talk about, I work with wonderful people. I still work there. I love what I do. I love the people I work with. We have been through a bumpy, bumpy, you know, road with Fox, I'm still doing what I love to do.
I love the viewers.
And like I said, I can't wait to get back to the time where I'm in the studio or outside with the fans doing the forecast.
But certainly it has been quite a trip up until this point.
Well, I mean, I just think part of it is cable news in general.
It's just a bizarre world.
I mean, I would say Fox may be less than some of the other places,
but it attracts a lot of strange, small people.
I didn't think Fox was really full of strange, small people,
but I've met enough in the cable news industry to say that.
I think Fox is sort of an island unto itself. And 90%
of my experiences there were very positive and 10% were extremely negative. But that's, you know,
not a terrible ratio for any job. I feel that the people that were hired at Fox were not your
quintessential anchors either. You know, you look like you look at a Sean Hannity who was, you know, a construction worker.
You know, Roger never asked me for my resume, basically. It was like you met with him. He either liked you or not.
I think I told him that I quit college after four, four months because I wasn't doing what I love to do.
And he was like, oh, I like that about you. That's the best thing you could have done. Quit college.
You know, I think we were all sort of like misfit toys a little bit. Uh, and right. And, and a lot of us still are. And that
was sort of the beauty of Fox is that we weren't kind of hired in the traditional way. It was
sort of like, I like her, she's spunky, or I like this guy because he, you know, he came from
nothing. Um, and, and, and that's what kind of that built that foundation of
Fox. It wasn't the traditional of you give a resume, you have an agent, you go meet them.
They look at your tape. No one ever looked at my tape.
When, when Roger offered me the primetime role and he offered me a big raise. And I remember
saying, this is unbelievable. I would do this for free. I can't believe he was giving me a big raise. Like, I love my job so much.
And then like three months into my role in primetime, I was like, I said Santa Claus
is white and everybody lost their mind.
I was actually only repeating something a black woman had said, but I agreed with her
that the commercial depiction of Santa Claus was white and people lost their minds.
And there were so many negative articles written.
And I was like, what the hell is going on? Oh, wait, now I know why they give you all the money.
I figured out why they give you all the money. No sane person would do this for a living without
getting their pocket lined, at least. It's just a daily barrage of negativity and fighting. And
you're like, why am I doing this again? Remember how nice the afternoon show was?
I know. Look at Tucker, man. I see him every day and he's doing great work.
And I feel for him because, you know, he's got to have security and he worries about his family.
You know, people like to think, oh, the big anchor man making so much money and like fame and fortune.
You know, he worries about his family and the
safety of his family, you know? Oh, yeah. I mean, he and I had a long talk when I was leaving Fox
and he was moving into the primetime. And I almost felt I told him, you know, about my reservations
of the about the job and the lifestyle. And I almost felt bad.
He was happy and excited.
And I almost felt like, I'm going to pass you this baton,
but this baton may be covered in asbestos and bus exhaust
and other things that you really don't want to touch
and you don't want around you and you don't want to breathe in.
So be careful.
Put on the gas mask.
Put on the rubber gloves.
Go do it in a hazmat suit,
but do it because you'll be good at it.
And he is.
But I do feel for him now
because I see them, you know,
of course, all the left wing
will tell you that Tucker
is a white supremacist.
And it's like, this is what they do.
If you take any rhetorical risks at all,
especially on dicey subjects like race, where you don't go along perfectly with what the left wants you to say, they'll demonize you.
And Tucker is extremely effective at what he does.
He's not always ginger about the way he approaches tough issues.
But cable news is just a brutal landscape.
And, you know, the funny thing is, J.D., when I left, I took all the furniture to my office, you know, as I was required to.
I took all my stuff and I left one thing and it was a sign hanging on my wall that read, you don't have to be crazy to work here.
We have on the job training.
Well, this is why I love what you're doing now. It's because I feel like we are at a great need
for this kind of media, this kind of discussion, because you only have, when I'm on Tucker's show,
I get three and a half minutes to sort of like, oh, the governor, here's what he did. Break,
you know? Yeah, you're out.
But it's so great that you have time to talk. You're able to like have thoughtful conversations back and forth.
And this, I think, you know, the podcast, especially in the time of COVID, I will tell
you that your podcast has actually helped me lose weight.
Really?
Yes, because I realized because I did gain the COVID at least 19, not quite 19, but close. And then I thought, you know what,
for my family's sake, I've got to take care of myself. I'm going to start to walk.
And I needed things to listen to. And I was so grateful when your podcast came along because
I would just keep walking. I mean, Steve Crowder, your interview was him was three hours. So I'm
like, Oh, I'm just going to keep on walking for three hours. So, but my point is I love that, you know, you're immersed in
this conversation. That's very thoughtful. And it's not like, boom, you're out or wrap.
We got it. Yes. I love it. I'll tell you. And I do love the fact that you can inject humor in,
you know, in a way that you really, it's hard to do on cable news. I tried. I mean, I remember one night the New York Times was there covering my show and it was a tough
news night. I mean, it was brutal, the news that day. And the reporter asked like, what did you,
how would you describe, you know, that hour? And I said, well, we, you know, we talked about
terrorism. We talked about ISIS and we had a lot of laughs. And if you can find a way to do that when you
only have 42 minutes, you know, not that's the show without the commercials, then good on you.
But it's just so much easier to have a natural flow of conversation that sometimes is happy,
sometimes is sad, sometimes is infuriating. You cover all the emotions in this forum.
And it's not just outrage as cable news is.
More with JD in one second.
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again. Back to JD in one second. But first, I want to bring you this feature that we call
You Can't Say That. The full name in my head is you can't say that or do that or think that.
Oh, wait, this is America. The latest edition for you today is about words I'm going to say
that may get me in trouble. You ready? Insane, crazy, nuts. That's right. The word police,
better known as the Associated Press style book, has just deemed those words derogatory. Yes, you're a bad person now if you
say crazy. The Associated Press makes the grammar rules that basically press people are supposed to
follow if we want to be good people in writing our articles or for news anchors to say on the air.
And in a tweet yesterday, the AP let us all know that, you know, what you could say on Monday and
be a good person, you can no longer say on Tuesday if you want to be a good person because those terms are, quote, derogatory.
They said such as insane, crazy, crazed, nuts or deranged, telling writers not to use these words unless they are part of a quotation that is essential to the story.
Mm hmm.
So that's insane.
And I have heard your offer, AP, and I refuse. I reject it. I think it's crazy. I think it's nuts. I think it's moronic. And I'm going to let that be my last word on the matter.
Okay. That officially was our segment. And it's very, very personal. And it gets kind of emotional.
So I just kind of want to give you
a little listener warning on that.
It's tough.
These subjects are tough.
Janice has been through it
and I've been through it.
And the two of us kind of held hands
and went through it together
when it happened at Fox.
And this is the very first time
she and I will ever have spoken
about this publicly.
We've had a lot of private talks about it, but when I wrote
my book, which talked about my story at Fox, she was not yet, she had not yet outed herself as a
participant in that whole thing. And when she wrote her book, I was not yet on the air. I was
not on the air. I was, I was in between jobs. So I didn't get to talk to her about it. I remember
watching her on all these shows thinking they're not asking her the right stuff. They're not getting her to talk about the right things.
She and the women of Fox News, not me, not Gretchen, she and the women of Fox News who
had everything to lose are the real heroes of that story.
They're the ones who risked everything.
I think you're going to hear some details about the story that you've never heard before.
And that may prove helpful to some people out there who are still,
who are still struggling with this right now. So without further ado, back to JD.
I want to talk about television. Before I get to that, though, let's talk about radio,
because you mentioned your background is in radio. Janice is from Canada,
and she was always incredibly beautiful. Your throwback Thursday pictures. I always look
forward to them. I'm like, she was always gorgeous. Like what the hell she did. You didn't even have
a damn awkward face. You always had that million dollar smile. You always had perfect hair. You
always nice and tall. And then I learned from your book that you used to be a dog catcher for some of
those years. Not for very long. Uh, but yeah, I was one of those kids. And I think you were probably too.
I always wanted to work. Like right when I was like 10 years old, I would go to my dad and say,
when can I work? When can I make money? When I, you know, I really want to get out there.
And I had lots of odd jobs. And there was one particular summer when I was in high school
that I were, I applied for a job at city hall
at, uh, Ottawa city hall, which is where I grew up, was born in Toronto. And they were looking
for, um, kind of like help secretary help, uh, you know, filing and taking phone calls and that
kind of thing for the bylaw department. Uh, and the bylaw department is basically all the jobs
that the police officers don't want
to do. So you go, you know, you log calls from people saying, my next door neighbor's grass is
too long or his dog is barking. So you take those calls all day long and you write them up and,
you know, the bylaw enforcement officer will go out and if he hears that dog barking,
he's going to issue a ticket there., you know, there were building codes,
like you had to go out. She's got pictures of herself, by the way, in the in sort of the
security uniform. The bylaw. Yes. Checking out the situation with the barking dog.
I did that job for several summers, but I wasn't in the outfit. I was like just taking the phone
calls and logging the calls. And then when I decided that I was going to quit university, that I was going to, you know, I was journalism. I was taking journalism. It was
five years. And, you know, three months in, I was like, when do I get to be on camera? And they're
like fifth year. I'm like, I'm out of here. So I quit and I went back and I, I didn't, you know,
my parents were very upset with me, but I was like, I'm going to work. I'm going to, you know,
I had a job at a clothing store at a men's clothing store for a while. And I went back to city hall and I said,
listen, I, I, I quit school. Can you guys like, can I, is there any opportunities with the,
with the bylaw department? They're like, suit up. So I was the one that called out the,
did the calls to the bylaw officer, like bylaw based to car 16, we have a 1046 on the loose. So I was
doing that. And actually the people I worked with said, that's how your job in radio began
is being the bylaw enforcement dispatcher. Absolutely. I loved it. Oh, we would always
joke. Like we would make like, you know, kind of like, you know, you couldn't say stuff on the
radio, but we would kind of like sneak things in that were kind of like suggestive and stuff.
It was a crazy world back then.
I think this is how my TV career began for me on the aerobics stage because I used to
be a diet aerobics teacher.
Like, you know, there's something about it, right?
You enjoy the performance.
You enjoy, in that case, barking at people.
People might say I still do that.
Right.
And then there you were parallel up in canada working on the similar track and all of that wound you up
eventually sitting next to don imus who at the time uh with either the exception of howard stern
or not depending on how you see those two and their radio careers when they were up against each other, was the biggest radio star in the country. Again, Howard is like, what? And you did not have a very
favorable experience with him. That's an understatement. And it took me a long time
to be able to talk about it. And I wrote about it in the book that came out last year, two years ago,
mostly sunny. I was working at a radio station for several years in Ottawa, a classic rock station,
and fell in love with a boy and followed him to Houston. Lived in Houston for a couple of years.
I always did radio and television on the side. So radio was my primary love and my primary, you know, job. And the television stuff
was always like, you know, uh, did weather and I did traffic on some of the local channels. Anyway,
something happened in Houston, uh, a situation where I was, um, um, someone broke into my
apartment at night in Houston and, uh, robbed me and assaulted me. And he got out of the apartment. But obviously,
that was a huge moment in my life that made me think, I got to do something different. I don't
want to live in Houston anymore. I don't feel safe. I went back to Ottawa for less than a year.
And I was working at the local radio station and I have dual citizenship.
So my father was American and and I was able to get my dual citizenship. And I'm very blessed to
have that. And one of my coworkers came over and said, J.D., you'd be really good at this job. And
I looked at it and it said, you know, entertainment reporter for Don Imus in New York. I was like,
what? Why do you think I'd be good at
this? He's like, well, look at it. You've done all those jobs. You were a jock on the radio.
You've done television. You've done news. I mean, this is right up your alley. You have dual
citizenship. I thought, you know what? Okay. I'll send him my tape and my resume. Never in a million
years thinking that I would get a call back. And I got a call back and it was the program director of WFAN. And he said,
I liked your resume. When can you get here? We'll interview you. He didn't say,
we're going to fly you there or here's your transportation. I had to drive myself to New
York, Astoria, Astoria, Queens. And I interviewed and Imus wasn't there the first day
he was at his ranch in New Mexico, which is what he did in the summertime. Um, but I sat there with
the gal that was leaving Christie Muzumechi and she kind of like said, why do you want this job?
Like, uh, you know, she's like, well, you're like, it's my dream. What do you mean? It's New York City. Oh, my goodness. You know, meanwhile, we're in the basement of like, you know, Kauffman Astoria Studios. It wasn't long after that, when I, you know, when Imus was in the studio that I realized that this was probably the worst job of my career.
And yeah, so just tell us why, like, what did he do to you?
He was extraordinarily mean. He, well, here's the thing, he was very good at manipulation. So he at certain times, he'd be like, doing a good job, like he would, he would like throw that in
once in a while, just when you were like, off the edge of like, wanting to like, you know,
like run away and hide or move back to
Canada. And I knew from the other guys that I was, you know, that I was working with that I was doing
a good job when I would go in and I would deliver and, you know, try to make him laugh or, but he
was very cool, you know, right away, it was sort of told, like, don't look at him when he walks in,
he had always had a gun. So he had a gun, a loaded gun with him. He was able to bring a gun into work every single day. He said it was
for protection, but he would like, he would come out sometimes and you know, the traffic reporter
would be, um, sitting, you know, their back would be to the studio and he would come out with the
gun and point it like at the traffic reporter's head and like think that was funny there were times where he would sit there and take the bullets out of his gun and name
the bullets after us this one's for burning this one's for said janice um he he would call me dumb
stupid fat there was one time where he the the most terrible time I remember was he brought me in one time and do you know remember
Denise Austin remember the exercise lady so she used to come on the show I told you I was an
aerobics instructor I mean you should she's right up your ass this is your lane so ironically Jane
Fonda was another inspiration but that didn't end well fine by me totally fine by me she won't be appearing on your show anytime she will not
no no which is a-okay okay keep going so um oh yeah oh yeah she said she would come on maybe
what do you guys think let me know if you think i should interview her i think it's going to be a
little awkward absolutely absolutely i think i would love to hear an interview with jane you
should i mean why not why i would love to finish the conversation and say, Jane, let's talk. I think your plastic surgery
looks amazing. You look great. I just wanted to know why, you know, like you're talking about
starting a movie about old people and you're talking about being real. And like, you've
talked about it 50,000 times with everybody else. So I want to ask a question. Anyway, memory lane.
Yeah. I mean, listen, I would listen to that interview.
There's a lot of people I think you should interview.
I'm not going to interview Debra Messing and I don't care what you say.
Oh, I agree with you.
She's a nice person.
She's too hateful.
She hates everybody on the right.
I feel bad for her.
I actually feel bad for her and Soledad O'Brien.
I feel like anybody that's that vicious on social media must have like a terrible life.
Like, why?
Why are you like this?
Oh, she's angry again.
Oh, what a shock.
Okay, sorry.
Keep going.
Denise Austin.
Oh, Denise Austin.
So this is the time where I'm thinking to myself, oh, I got to get out of this job.
This is a terrible job.
Because he really, every day he would just call you a new name. But there was one day where he's he he summoned me into the studio and she was in the studio and he was like they he brought his show over to Fox business, but he was on MSNBC before that.
That was before he made that comment about the female basketball players that ended his
time there.
Okay.
So go ahead.
So, uh, he made me stand up and said, and said, Denise, she's got to get a boyfriend.
Like she needs to lose a lot of weight.
So like, look at her thighs and look at her backside. What can we do for her? She's got a little bit, you know, she needs more.
It was, it was devastating. I was like, you know, I'm somebody that struggled with my weight my
whole entire life. And I, you know, I have a better outlook now. Um, but you know, at the time,
you know, it was, it was certainly bringing up all of these
old wounds where he is like tearing me down for my appearance and, you know, having to try to
lose weight. Yes. And on television. And she was like, Oh, I was like, but I'm well within the
guidelines of weight watchers. I remember saying that I was just like devastated. And, uh, yeah.
So I knew that that was sort of the
beginning. Did she say, I miss you're being so inappropriate. No, no, no. She just sort of,
I mean, she tried to sort of like make it funny. I think we were all like everybody's jaw dropped,
but I will tell you, um, you know, he, he recently died and, and I've had a lot of time to sort of reflect on
the relationship with him. And when I came to Fox, by the way, that was one thing I was very adamant
about is when he came over and everyone knew, cause I told everyone, I'm like, Oh, he was
terrible to me. Um, I, I told Bill shine, um, that under no circumstances would I ever do weather on Imus' show.
I don't care if there's a Category 5 coming down on New York City.
There is no way I will ever.
And they were good with that.
They were good.
There was a time where I remember one producer,
there was a hurricane and they were like,
Janice Dean, can you do a weather report on Imus?
I'm like, no.
See clause number four on my contract.
That's right.
That's where Rick Reikmuth comes in to save the day.
That's right.
But I always envisioned myself.
I always thought to myself, if one day, if he called me and said, Janice, can you come talk to me in my office?
I just want to talk to you.
I always sort of envisioned him like apologizing. And I would have accepted the apology. I just, I just want to talk to you. I always sort of envisioned him like
apologizing and I would have accepted the apology. I would have, I would have accepted it. Um, but
he, he didn't obviously. And he died last year. And I remember being very conflicted,
obviously, because, you know, I was seeing all of these things on social media,
broadcasting hall of fame, like the amazing blah, blah, blah. And I went on, I was like, you know, all of these things can be true
that he can be like a, an award winning, winning broadcaster, a lot of kids with cancer,
helped a lot of kids with candor cancer, but he can also be somebody who was very abusive
and very cruel. And all of these things can be the same person. And it wasn't long after
that, that I got an email from a relative of his very close relative of his. And she emailed me
and said, I got this, your email from so-and-so. And I just want to tell you, I believe you,
I believe all of the things that he did to you because he was that person. He was
very cool. And I experienced it. And it, it made up for the, for the never getting that apology
from him to hear from somebody very close to him that gave me the acknowledgement that,
that he treated me terribly so I was grateful I was
grateful for that the fact that this can still bring you to tears 20 years after it happened
is why Sean says he used to say god help Don Imus if I ever see him in the street
you know like he hurt you in a particularly vicious way.
And it's bullying.
I mean, that's what he bullied you.
And bullying, you know, it does have a real effect.
And it can make you stronger for sure.
But it doesn't mean it is incredibly painful to go through.
Absolutely.
Even, you know, even in my mid-30s um but I will say also on the mostly sunny side
if it wasn't for the Imus job I would have never met Sean I would have never had my beautiful
children so I am grateful for that opportunity and I am grateful that I got that job because it did lead me by this point in, in our society, most people know that Roger Ailes
was the CEO and founder of Fox news and that he was, he was, his career ended at Fox after an
incredibly, incredibly successful run by a group of women there who, who spoke up about his sexual
harassment of them. And I think most people understand that Gretchen Carlson was the person to file a lawsuit that got that rolling that I stood up and supported the notion basically by telling my own story.
But I think less people know what an important role in that you played.
And even just saying important role, I paused a little because it brings up so many feelings for people. I know like the Me Too movement, which I don't, this was before the Me Too movement.
It's gone to such a strange place where people, it's just, it's turned into, it turned a little
witch hunty that I don't really want to even associate this experience with where that
movement wound up.
I thought it did a lot of good for a while. And now it's just different.
But what you did, what you did was incredibly brave when Roger was under fire. I always tell people like for a long time, I wasn't allowed to talk about your role in it because you didn't want
it public. And I understood that. And I didn't want my role public either. It was neat to drudge. And I still don't know by whom. To this moment, I have three suspects, but I don't know
who did it. But you've managed to dodge that bullet. And I wasn't going to out you, obviously,
but I always kind of wanted to because people are like, oh, you know, women, mostly women would say
to me, oh, you're very brave, you know, very brave. And I'm like, it's not about me.
It's about people like my friend who didn't have power, who did not have money in the
bank, who might've been married to a firefighter, who risked everything.
I just want the audience to know Janice Dean, she's the weather woman.
We haven't even gotten into the fact that not long before the Roger Ailes thing happened
a couple of years earlier, she'd been diagnosed with MS.
And we're talking about lesions on your brain a couple of years prior to this and your health
insurance and your babes.
And you already have worries about Sean having spent so much time at ground zero and what
health effects this may have.
You're dealing with all of that.
Roger, you got, you know, he's your boss.
He's going to keep you employed.
That's one thing about Fox.
They very rarely fire you.
You have health insurance.
Like you have a steady situation there.
And as we talked about earlier, it is very family-like in large part.
You know, there's a lot of great people there who we both loved.
And the question gets asked because of Gretchen's lawsuit.
Could he be this thing? Could could this be a man who is abusing his power and abusing his staff
and hurting people? And the vast majority of people said, I'm not touching this. Right. Like,
I mean, I still think we know people that it did happen to, we ultimately would find out later, who did not come forward,
because it was scary. It was damn scary. But you know who did? Janice Dean, the meteorologist who
damn well needed that job and that insurance. And I will never forget, Janice, the night before you
went in to talk to Paul Weiss, how scared
you were.
You, you had a panic attack.
You broke out in hives.
It was, but you went, you did it.
You went in there the next day.
And I think, I do believe as difficult as that situation was and as complicated as it
was and the, and the, the love we also felt for Roger. I mean, at the same time,
it was so hard. I still think that day and that experience and what you did changed the world.
I really believe that. I think it saved a lot of women.
We were in it together. I mean, that's how I thought of it is, but yes, there,
before I went into Paul Weiss, I remember it. Well, it was,
we make a funny situation out of it because I was riding the long Island railroad home
and I, you know, thought again about it. I, I was like, I can't do this. I'm too worried.
I'm worried about my family. I'm worried about my kids. I actually thought I was going to be fired. I thought Roger's never
going to go. It's never going to happen. None of us believed he was going to get fired. No way.
None of us believed it. And I remember being on the Long Island Railroad and saying, nope,
I just can't do it. I can't risk it. I can't risk and, and all of the things that you said. Um, and I got home
and I said to Sean, I was like, I can't go in there. I can't tell them. I I'm, I'm too afraid,
Sean. I'm too afraid. He's going to find out. I'm going to be fired. And it was Sean, you know,
Sean, who is so steadfast. He just looked at me and he said, you have to do it. We'll deal with whatever happens.
You have to go in and do it. And that was the first night I've ever had a panic attack. And
I mean, I did, I broke out in high, I've got pictures because I've never had anything like
that happen before. And I remember calling you and at like 12 o'clock midnight and, and just hearing your voice and just saying, you know what,
we're on the side of the angels. If he's not guilty as you know, then,
you know, he has nothing to fear,
but you have to go in and tell your story. You have to,
and don't ever ride the long Island railroad again,
because it just makes you depressed.
The long Islandroad is depressing.
Well, you said, I'll pay for your car. Do you need a car service? You're not riding the train
in to go talk to Paul Weiss. No, car service need to go in style. So we got to sort of the middle
of the story before we gave you the beginning of the story, which is back after she left Imus. And so Janice winds up getting an opportunity to interview with Fox News.
And as you understand from the story she told, a welcome opportunity. Not only is it obviously a
bigger job, but she wanted to get out. And Fox News was number one and it's a great chance.
And she met Roger and ultimately he
did hire her and she's had a great career there, but it was a bit of a bumpy beginning.
And, and this, we didn't, I didn't know this story about her until I'd known her for years.
So like one day we wound up sharing stories, but just tell them what happened between you and Roger.
So the first meeting was in his office. And again, it was one of those situations
where, you know, he was like, Oh, I hear you on I miss you sound kind of like a naughty girl.
Cause I mean, I did, I did the scum report and it was, you know, it had to be pretty sometimes
provocative. And, you know, so he used that as sort of like the intro of art, you know,
are you a naughty girl? You certainly sound like it. And I was like, yeah, no, I'm actually a good actress. Uh, but I would tell, I told him, I was like, listen,
he's really cruel and I'm going to be flat out honest. I need to find another job because
otherwise I have to, I have to move. I can't, I will not do this job anymore. Um, and so it was,
it was fine. It was a fine meeting. He, again, asked me about
school. I don't think, you know, he never asked me what my politics were. He did ask me, you know,
have you heard about me? Like, what have you learned about Fox news? And I remember reading
an article, a long article about Roger that, that had been out at the time. So I, you know,
I educated myself on him and this empire that he had built. So I was able. So I, you know, I educated myself on him and this empire that
he had built. So I was able to ask that, you know, answer those questions. And amazing. What
an amazing job, you know, from a ditch digger in Ohio to, you know, the most powerful name in cable
news. And so it was fine with the magazines. They had him on the cover with the caption,
the most powerful man in news. Yes. So you got to get a picture, Janice, and then soon,
I don't know if it was before or after, but me in there as young cub reporters across from not just
the CEO and chairman and founder of Fox, which is number one, but literally the most powerful man
in all of news that IE, not someone who you want to cross or get on the wrong side of. Go ahead. Absolutely.
And listen, he was very charming and bawdy and funny. And, you know, there is there was something
about him that was, you know, that very, you know, and father like as well. All of those.
And as we said, neither one of us is somebody who's I mean, I'm bawdy, too. I don't that doesn't
bother me at all. I actually find it funny most of the time.
Like I, I'm not in no way are you or it's hard to say neither you nor I am uptight in
any way.
Right.
And you have to understand too, being in this business.
I mean, I was coming from the IMAS job, but I had, I had dealt with sexual harassment
my whole career. I mean, truly like in, in varying degrees, you're walking this weird line of like
laughing at these crazy jokes. And is he like hitting on me and he's, he's my boss. And how
do I, you know, so I already had like some, you know, I, I, I'd experienced something like this
before. And I always had like, it's another old guy
trying to hit on me. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, but at the time I also had Sean, so I had a
boyfriend, you know, I, I was, I was able to pull the boyfriend card. And, um, so that there was
that interview. Then the second time was, I got a call from his secretary saying, Mr. Ailes would like to meet you in the restaurant
bar area of the Renaissance Hotel in Times Square. I was like, okay, that's a little bizarre. I talked
to my agent at the time who was a female and she's like, oh, he just wants to meet you off campus.
No biggie. So I, you know, and at the time, I don't know, I think you and I've
talked about this, but at the time I wore like business suits all the time. Like, like, you know,
the boxy Hillary Clinton, we were at our frumpiest when you say we hadn't been foxified yet.
We were at our frumpiest. We didn't know how to dress. We didn't know how to do our makeup.
Nothing. I had like, you know, my hair was, uh, anyway, I was not the most, you know, I, I think you could tell that I had like,
you know, some, some potential. I went to the meeting and he was, he, he got there and we sat
at a table and he told me, order wine, you know, do you want a drink? And I was like, okay, I,
I guess, I guess I'll have a glass of wine. And he ordered the same. And he,
and I remember him asking me how I was doing. And if I had was thinking about him did,
you know, not about a job, but was I thinking about Roger? Um, and I was like, uh, well,
I was thinking that you might be a good boss someday, you know, like I was just,
I remember you told me this later when he was like, I need to know how you see me. How do you see me? And you were like, like a teacher, like, like a mentor, like, like a father figure.
That's exactly what was happening. Meanwhile, I'm like, you know, nervously sipping wine. note here's like a pro tip for the men out there if you're trying to hit on somebody and you ask her that question and she says something about father or bail it's not right right but knock on
another door no and and at that point i was like there's no way i'm getting this job you know like
whatever right this is a come on this is not an interview but he did it in a way that it was like
a testing thing like he was testing me like how you know he was testing me, like how, you know, how, how far can
I take this? It, you know, without her, like, you know, saying something that's going to like
shoot me down type of thing. Um, but then all of a sudden he got, he would get business-like again
and say, well, you know, I've been thinking about you and I think you'd be great on television.
Um, you know, I'll get back to you. I gotta, I gotta get out of here. And I remember him saying
something like, we don't want anybody seeing us together. And I was like, okay. So he left. And, and I thought to
myself, I'm gonna have to move back to Canada. Like I can't work with I'm as I'm not going to
get this job. And I got a call maybe three or four days later, again, secretary calls me,
it's Mr. Ailes on the phone, he would like to speak with you. And I was, I don't remember where I was, Megan. I was right in the living, you know, in the living room, my little tiny apartment in Queens. And he gets on the phone and he's like, Janice Dean. And I was like, hello, Mr. Ailes. And he was like, so what's going on? You know, and I just, oh, how's Imus? And I said, Oh, you know, I'm, I'm one step away
of like losing my mind and, and I have to get out of that job. And then, you know, it was sort of
this quiet period. And he was like, so I've been wondering like how you are at phone sex. And I was
like, I'm terrible. I'm terrible at phone sex. This is my favorite part of the whole story.
I mean, listen, we are making, I know we're making a joke out of this.
And at the time, at the time I was, I remember at the time going, oh my gosh, I wish I was
recording this.
This is crazy.
What is this person asking me?
And, and, and I said that I was like, I was terrible.
He's like, I don't believe that.
I don't believe that for a second.
So pretend, you know, I'm your boyfriend. Like, how would you talk to your boyfriend? You
have a boyfriend, right? Like, how would you talk to him if, you know, like you were like wearing
blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, um, you know what, Mr. Ailes, this is not a one 900 number.
Uh, but you know, but thank, thanks for calling type of thing. And then, you know, then he kind
of snapped out of it and he was like, so have you ever done the weather before? Because I'm looking for a weather person.
Oh my God.
Talk to your agent.
So that was sort of like, that was the way it was.
And I took the job and people were like,
why did you take that job?
And I'm like, well, I had another boss
who was basically naming bullets after me.
Yes, you should have refused it
and you should have gone over to CVS and
interviewed with less moon Vez.
Oh,
exactly.
Charlie Rose should have gone.
No,
you should have gone to NBC and spoken with the executives there who are
definitely not rape apologists.
What?
You could have been from Matt Lauer,
Janice.
Oh,
wait,
I know that.
I mean,
yes,
yes.
So where are you supposed to go go there was no better place when it
came to that really wasn't and I really I never felt threatened I certainly was like grossed out
and like but I always felt like I was able to sort of like swat swat him I mean I hate to use that
word but I was able to sort of like you know use my sense of humor to get him like back onto the, the, the discussion that
I wanted. And, and he did hire me and I, I worked for, you know, I'm still there 17 years later,
but there were times when I was first hired, he would see me on TV and then he would call me up
to his office. Um, and then I would kind of sit there and he would talk about the shop and then
he would get weird. But again, he would always ask me about the boyfriend, like you still dating
that boyfriend. And I'm yep. Yep. the boyfriend. Like, you still dating that boyfriend?
And I'm, yep, yep.
Sean's still around, you know, so.
Yeah.
The funny thing that people don't know is you didn't even really want to marry Sean.
You just did it as a block.
That's right.
So, you know, but that's kind of my story.
Were there inappropriate comments?
Yes, of course.
When I went up to the office, did he ask me to spin? unfortunately it was sort of like let me he didn't he never said spin he
would just say let me see you like let me see you you know and i remember the first time i was on
air megan and i wore like a business suit and the phone call came like 30 seconds later. Yeah. Burn that business suit.
That reminds me of when I tried to dye my hair brown.
I had gotten a divorce from my first husband and I was going through one of those like sort of skin shedding moments where it's like, OK, I'm the new me.
And I cut my hair short and I dyed it brown.
And I'll never forget Brit Hume coming into the office and he said, I have a message from Mr. Ailes.
He hired a blonde and he wants a blonde. Okay. Back to blonde I went and I actually checked my contract because
of course I'm a lawyer. And it did say that he had the right to tell me no, if I wanted to make any
major changes to my look. And so he actually had the legal right to tell me. And then I wound up
doing all this research on like how much control they could have over me in terms of what I wore. Although I will say everybody thinks that Fox has
this, uh, no pants. That doesn't sound right. Mandate. No pants, no pants allowed. It's no
pants day. That didn't come out right. But you know that you're not allowed to wear pants as a
woman. You have to wear a skirt or a shirt or shorts. Never. In my experience, I don't know. I don't know somebody to whom that has happened, but I'm not saying it's impossible, but never. And I mean, I feel like I would have been one of the women who they would have said that to. I wasn't always powerful. I started off very not powerful and never. I wore pants all the time. Nobody ever called me or said anything about it. Now they, they didn't want you to wear too many dark colors, but that was just because they wanted your clothes to sort
of pop on the air. Right. But, um, yeah, it's, there are a lot of rumors about Fox that aren't
true. So this was 2006, right? That, that you did, what was the year? 2003. So this was 2003.
Actually I interviewed, it was, it was this time, you know, 18 years ago, 17 years ago. Yep.
Oh, wow. So I didn't know that. So I got hired by Fox in 2004. It was August of 2004. And
I didn't have anything like that happen to me on my like interview with him. I remember he did make one inappropriate comment about he asked me what I had done that weekend.
And I told him I went to the bar Hogs and Heifers in New York with some friends.
And that's the bar that they based that movie Coyote Ugly on where all the girls dance on the bar.
And he he said, did you take off your top and throw your bra against the wall, against the wall, something
like that. I can't remember how he phrased it. And I just got out of bounds and I was like, no,
but I did have a peps blue ribbon in a can. So it's kind of like that, right? We're like, yeah,
you, you feel it, right? Like he throws you something that's definitely got an R rating on it
and you respond with a PG, right? Like that's kind of how it'd go. RPG, RPG. And,
and I think like you said, he was testing, like, is she, is she cool? That's kind of how I saw it
initially. Like, is she cool? Is she uptight? Is she going to be somebody, you know, they say that
his philosophy was, I want to hire men who I want to have a beer with and women who I want to sleep
with that, like, Like it or not,
that's what they said Roger was looking for in people he put on the air. And I do think that's
just sort of a crass way of boiling down to he wanted attractive women who he thought people
would like. And he wanted decent guys who didn't take themselves too seriously. Like that is just
a short form way of Roger's approach to the news. And guess what?
It worked.
So I had a similar thing, you know, but then after I got there, I was down in the D.C.
Bureau for my first two years.
And so I didn't really have to see him much, but he just kept calling me up there.
It wasn't until like 2005 is when things really got bad and it just ramped up to a level that
was unignorable and incredibly uncomfortable. And, you know, all of which I detailed in my journals, which I wound up giving to giving to Paul Weiss. I mean, I had it all written down. I was a serial harasser. I saw him as somebody who wanted
to have an affair with me. And, but I was worried because I knew I was not going to have an affair
with him. And as you know, you don't, the last thing you want to do is reject a man, any man
who has power over you. It's not a good situation for a woman to be in every man who gets rejected
by a woman, feel some resentment toward her usually. And you really don't want that with your boss. And, you know, I was doing well at Fox and I didn't want him to change the stakes of my doing well. I the nose too. Really on the nose. I mean, I remember he told me, I won't name the anchor, but she was very famous at the time.
And she said, he said, um, she got to the top by sleeping with her boss. You should be more like
her. It's like, okay, that's a little on the nose. And it just went, went on and on. And then,
you know, as has now been documented, I wrote about it in my book. He ultimately
tried to make out with me, um, three times in his office. I got away it in my book. He ultimately tried to make out with me three times
in his office. I got away. He grabbed me again. It wasn't like grab, like assault. It was just
like trying to have me. I got away and I got over to the front door and I got away a third time. He
tried a third time and then he looked at me and said, when is your contract up? And I was like, holy shit. And I got out of there and I called
my lawyer and said, this is what just happened to me. And he opened up a case file just so that it
would be in the conflict log at Jones Day, which was the law firm I had worked for. And I was on
pins and needles for so many months thereafter. You know,
I went, I discussed it with a, with a, with a supervisor whom I've never named. And I was told,
just ignore him. You know, he's a, he's an unhappily married guy and he's going through a
thing and just stay, if you stay away from him, it'll go away. And I was like, great. That's all
I want. I didn't want to make a federal case out
of it. I just wanted to go back to where I'd been before the nonsense, you know, being judged on my
professional stuff. And it worked. You know, I dodged his calls. I was sitting next to Major
Garrett in my office. We shared an office and, and I'm like a first or second year reporter.
And my phone keeps lighting up and you can see the name of the person calling you on the display and it keeps saying roger ailes roger ailes and major's looking
at me like what the hell yeah i'm like oh so i told major all about it he was actually very
supportive and um helped me navigate it and i also told him about you know the big sort of
culmination when he tried to then kiss and make out. And, and he gave me some good advice
and he was not the supervisor who I refer to, but he wasn't my supervisor. He's my friend and my
office mate. But anyway, what did he say until what did he was horrified? He was horrified,
but JD, he had seen a lot of that stuff with me. Roger was not the only one to behave like that.
You know, I, I wrote my book about Arlen Specter.
Again, God rest his soul, who was like really inappropriate with me.
And he he said things like, Megan, after I survived cancer, you're the one who gave me my libido back.
Oh, gross.
And more more than that.
He asked me out for drinks many, many many times asked to show me his
little apartment that he i'm like no thank you senator and but this guy was chairman of the
judiciary committee and i was covering the supreme court so i needed a relationship with him i could
it was one another thing like you don't want to reject him but i am not going to his little
apartment he was telling me about how it was like a bomb shelter. He had like enough Campbell soup in there to last him two years. And he wanted to show me a soup. Oh, that's sexy. That's sexy.
JD, these guys got to work on their act. Oh my gosh. Let me show you my soup. Now that I've
gotten my post-cancer libido back. Well, in a time of COVID, I mean, that might be attractive now.
No, but here's the funny thing about Major. So he goes, I did go see Arlen Specter in the Capitol building.
He invited me to have lunch in the Senate private dining room.
And I was like, well, that sounds fancy.
It's like something I should do.
So I look at Major and I'm like, this seems like a thing, right?
Like this seems kind of like a good invitation.
And he looked at me with this like, like one of those, like, are you kidding me faces?
And he goes, 17 years, I've been covering Capitol Hill. Not once have I been invited to the Senate
private dining room. Oh, major. Oh, well. So I went, I got over there. Next thing I know,
Specter's got me in something called his hideaway office, which they give to the most important
senators there. You
know, like if you're head of the chairman of the judiciary committee or whatever. And he keeps in,
he keeps like, it's like three hours later and he hasn't left me. I'm like, oh my God,
I got to get out of here. How do I get out of here? So he had to go vote. And I texted Major
like, oh my God, he's got me on something called his hideaway. What should I do? And Major's like,
get out, get out now, run. That is just for towel snapping rights. major's like get out get out now run that is
just for towel snapping rights i'm like i don't know what that is but it sounds bad so i got out
of there my point is simply like major had sort of lived through a bunch of these with me where
he's like jesus these disgusting old men are everywhere you know he was a good guy so yada
yada yada i mean that's all just the setup for when you and I had talked about like our experiences with Roger, but we we did not know other harassment victims. People now look back and say, like, why didn would you have me do? It wasn't exactly like something I could go report to human resources. Like, they work for him.
And it wasn't like something I could bring to the CEO, who was him.
And so then Gretchen filed the lawsuit.
And you and I, I'll never forget the day we saw that lawsuit come through.
I know.
I know.
Right?
It was, yeah, it was jaw dropping because I had gotten to know
Gretchen over the years and we had, you know, I would say we were, you know, friends and I had
told her about what had happened with Roger. I remember the dinner that I was at with a makeup
artist and Gretchen, and we were talking about Roger and, and I felt comfortable enough to tell her what
had happened. And she was very interested in the story so much so that she asked me a few times to
tell her about it. And then she would ask me if I knew anybody else. And I remember specifically
her asking, did it happen to Megan Kelly? And I would never, you know, betray you. I just said, I'm not sure. Um, so, and to that, uh, and I also
had a good enough relationship with her that she never told me she had issues with Roger.
We would all get called to his office if there was a problem. And I remember at the time that,
you know, she had gotten the one o'clock show and the ratings weren't good. So I knew that she was
going up to his office a lot and, you know, I'm sure he can be really mean, like really mean. But she had never told me, you know,
after I had shared my story, she had never said that she was harassed by him. So that's why I,
we were both shocked. Well, they didn't have a good relationship really from the time he moved
her off Fox and Friends because he didn't think she was good in that role.
And he had said that to me a few times privately.
He didn't he did not like her on that show.
He thought she was too stiff.
They did not have a good relationship.
And she she had she gave an interview to some like Connecticut Home magazine one time and got completely sandbagged.
Like the reporter was really just
such a jerk i remember reading it being like oh i hate this reporter they completely it was like a
bait and switch i thought you were talking about like her beautiful home and it was like you suck
and everybody at fox sucks and tell me more why everyone sucked and she was pissed and she blamed
it on him and i just know they had this huge fight where like i can't remember how the f-bomb
was used but like either she told him to fuck off or he told her to fuck off or something it just
ended with an f-bomb and i remember being like oh that's not good and uh she was already mad she was
on the one o'clock or whatever it was two o'clock instead of the the morning show and i don't know
from the outside we all just thought it's not going well for her here and that, and you,
it can't go well for you there if you don't get along with Roger. And, you know, now she says
it's because she wouldn't sleep with a guy. Um, and apparently has tapes of him saying inappropriate
things, which, you know, we all could have, he did, he did so many things. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
that's the thing is it's like, I don't know. We just didn't, when she filed that lawsuit, I think most of us were like, not sure. Cause she got fired. She hadn't been getting along with him.
She hadn't been succeeding in terms of the ratings at all in that afternoon show,
although she claimed she had been, but the truth is she hadn't. And, um, we were skeptical,
right? It was like, and we, and we Roger. Like, you and I had both gotten past those
incidents and had been had many others, you know, by then it was like, you know, it wasn't that
unusual. So and by the way, he never retaliated against me at all for not going along with it at
all. Never. And most of the women I've now and I've now talked to about it have said the same
that he wasn't a retaliator, but it wasn't true in all cases. That's, I'm not trying to disparage Gretchen. I'm just trying to
tell the audience it was confusing when she first filed the lawsuit because we were much more
aligned with him than we were with her. It was jaw dropping. And every instinct was to defend him
and not her. Yes, absolutely. But then because you and I knew our stories there, of course we were like, well, you know
what, if it's happened to us, I wonder if it's happened to other people.
Um, and I had heard stories over the years of, you know, situations.
I was an office mate with someone that, you know, would go up to his office and she would
be really upset coming, you know, downstairs.
And she never told me why,
you know, there are all these things that I, over the years, I want to talk to you about that. Can
I, can we talk about that? We don't, we don't have to name the person, but this is one of the
things that confuses me when I still, when I look back on the Fox era, I remember this person,
you called me after she came back to your shared office and she was in tears and you're like,
she just came from a meeting with him. And I was like, Janice, you got your shared office and she was in tears and you're like she just came
from a meeting with him and i was like janice you got to find out why she was in tears like
is he doing it to other people like is there a thing that we should know about and you did you
to your credit you went to her and you were like did something happen and she totally denied it
and was like absolutely not he's, he's saying something about my
career that I'm unhappy with. Like she wanted a show and he wasn't going to give her a show,
something like that. And you pressed her and you walked away convinced, you know, okay,
it really isn't that. So we were like, okay. And then after Ailes went down and he'd been
fired, escorted out of the building, This person called me and I didn't really know
this person. And I was like, this is it. She's going to tell me that she really was a victim of
his. And that when Janice asked her all those years ago, she was lying to Janice. And I remember
where I was and I was talking to her and I asked her, I'm like, so did you ever have a thing with it? It was ever a situation.
She was like, absolutely not. Like, I'm so confused. I don't know what to believe, you know,
like, by that point, I knew what he was. And then but here's like a post epilogue to the epilogue.
I recently spoke with somebody else who was like, Oh, yeah, she was one of his victims.
I'm like, what? She was like, Yeah, I talked to her. So Janice, I mean, like the,
like women were not comfortable talking about this. No, they weren't. They weren't. But like
you said, and to this day, had your name not been leaked, I don't think, you know, this is just my
personal opinion has nothing to do with Gretchen. I don't think she would have won, um, because your, your name was leaked. And then that gave other women, uh,
the courage to, to share stories. Um, and you know, that's, that's when you and I decided,
okay, let's try to, let's try to find out. Let's, you know, let's, let's go undercover and, uh,
go door to door, you know, cause I had a good
relationship with a lot of these women. I had been there for so long and I would just basically
knock on people's doors and say, you know, everybody was freaked out obviously of what
was going on. Um, and the women of course. And so I would just knock on the door and say,
how are you doing? But even before you get to that, I mean, there was an enormous pressure campaign to speak up on his behalf, enormous pressure. And it was
direct and it was personal. And in some situations, jobs were threatened. And, you know, I look back
with forgiveness on the Fox News people who spoke out because they, A, didn't believe he was capable of it because,
you know, there was there wasn't if people think it was an open secret at Fox, it wasn't.
It wasn't. And B, they love the guy. He had done a lot of good for a lot of us there,
helped families with cancer, paid for people's rehabilitation treatments and so on. He gave
everybody second chances and then some. And so, and, and see, no one really
liked Gretchen. I mean, that's the truth. Um, so I understood why they were defending him,
but there was no way, no way I was going to come out and say something that wasn't true.
You know, that he's not capable of this or he would never, which is essentially what people were saying. Um, I knew, I knew different and
you knew different. And we, that was an incredibly stressful time that I think of all the shit that's
gone down in my life over the past few years, Trump and NBC and all this stuff. That was the
most stressful thing. When, when our colleagues were coming out defending him Beth Ailes was
calling me trying to get me to come out and defend him and again I did feel loyal loyalty to him
and to Beth I cared about her I cared about their family and and I didn't like Gretchen so it's like, oh, my God. Andretchen was not going to get her settlement.
And what a leap of faith I'm taking to go in and talk about it.
It's like a suicide mission.
Yeah.
I mean, and I told you about the three times that were uncomfortable.
And I've been through some much worse situations.
Right.
So to take that risk and be like, okay, so this happened like 13 years
ago, but it might be a pattern of behavior, you know? So. Well, that's where you and I landed,
which was, we have no idea how these stories connect or don't connect to other stories that
may or may not exist. All we know is we have two pieces that may either be two individual pieces
or part of a larger mosaic. We don't
know the answer. And that's, that's where you and I were for a while. And we were relieved
that they were going to investigate it. Finally, it was like, okay, good. They're bringing in an
investigator and they'll get to the bottom of this. And if he's not a serial harasser, then good,
this will go away. They'll work it out with Gretchen, whatever happened between the two of
them. That's that. But the thing that happened that changed everything was somebody close to Ailes made the mistake of telling me that they had managed to limit the investigation to only the immediate team that had worked with Gretchen Carlson, which I knew would not include any talent.
You would not be called.
I would not be called or anybody else. You know,
that was like six people, half of whom were guys and, um, and low level producers who would never
have been alone with him. And, you know, you and I talked about this at length, like now what,
because it's one thing to be called in by the investigators and tell your story. But it's an another thing entirely
to raise your hand first and and volunteer to tell the story. I just felt like so much more
of a betrayal to be active about it instead of passive. And that I just had such a hard time
getting over it. And to this day, there are some people there who haven't forgiven me
for taking an active role. I mean, I remember somebody very powerful there saying to me,
I said, I followed my ethical compass. And he said, loyalty is a part of ethics, Megan.
And I said, I understand that, but you can be loyal to a child molester. But when you find out
he's hurting people,
you would betray him. You would betray that loyalty because there's a higher cause.
And that's the position I felt I was in. I didn't run and make a federal case out of it when he
harassed me. I did not sell him out. I didn't file a lawsuit. I didn't try to, I am woman,
hear me roar. That was unheard of, by the way, at the time it was happening to us.
Unheard of.
So I navigated it and I fixed my situation.
I went on.
But this is different.
Now the question is being put directly to me.
Are you going to stand up and say what he did or aren't you?
Are you somebody who's going to have the back of a person you don't particularly love? Um, because she's twisting in the wind right now. And anyway, it was just,
you and I talked about it and we talked about, well, what if it's just us too? Like, right. What
if we really aren't part of a mosaic? It sure would be easier if we thought there were others.
And like, if he is a serial harasser, there will be. And that's where Janice Dean, you know,
that's where like you made all the difference, all the difference. Going back to your earlier
comment about how you were in a non-threatening role, you know, you're the meteorologist.
That's why everybody would talk to you. You had prior to this moment, you had great relationships.
I had very solid friendships there too, but I think maybe people felt more threatened by me.
I was in a sort of powerful role and most people just kind of don't want to bother you in a role
like that. They think, you know, you'll get annoyed or I don't know what it was, but you were,
I would say you were, you were just a soft place to fall. You, you were always a soft place to
fall in my life and still are. And you project that to the world. They just know that about you.
So people started calling you and you started gently reaching out to people.
And lo and behold, there they were.
You know, this underground stiletto army of women who honestly said me too.
Yep.
Yep.
Before there was even a me too.
Yep. Very brave. there was even a me too. Yep.
Very brave.
Very brave.
Very brave.
But we couldn't have done it.
We would not have done it without you.
You know?
I still feel so bad when I look back on it, though, Janice.
I feel like, you know, I still wish that, you know, like, what if I had made a federal case out of it?
You know, what if, what if I had thrown caution to the wind and just thought like,
you know, I'm just going to make sure right now he's not this other thing.
You know, that some of the women who came after might not have had to
deal with it and and even now i have i have concerns the other way i don't regret anything
we did but i do feel like i was disloyal i still have that in me you know there's like a
a cult mentality at fox about you don't turn against the family and you certainly don't turn against
the patriarch of the family. And I still feel like I did betray him and in a way them,
and I understand why they don't like me. You know, like some of these guys were still there. I don't,
do you ever, do you ever, I don't, do you wrestle with that either way?
Yeah. I mean, there, there were people that I remember doing
interviews saying that, you know, these women are liars, like close to me, people I worked with that
I loved that were basically saying they're liars. Um, I think about that. I, you know, I think,
I think forgiveness is, is important. It's something I've learned to have more of over the years. I try to,
you know, forgive people. And we have to, you know, forgive ourselves too. I,
you know, to this day, I wonder sometimes like,
was he that monster? I don't, I mean, we've heard terrible stories. So yes, he probably was, but
he was so good. It's not black and white. It's very gray.
He was very kind to me when I was diagnosed with MS. We had a good relationship. He was like a
father figure. I mean, we really truly like, I mean, this man's career went, you know,
I cried when he died. I cried. I cried. There's video of me crying with Fox and Friends because
it is not that simple. It's not, it's never that simple. You know, like women that are married to
abusers and they, they keep going back. There's a reason for that. It's not that simple. We did
the best we could with the information that we had and you have to forgive yourself. And if those people are still going around saying like, you know, if Roger was still here, you know, this,
that, or the other thing, well, you know what? He's not. And that's, that's the way it, you know,
that's the way it unfolded. That's on him. That, that I do know. You, you always said,
all I said, I mean, like truly, what did I wind up doing? I wound up calling Locke the Murdoch. You know what I mean? That was
after all the wrestling of like, now what, now what do we do? Because all these women and men
at the company are coming out and saying never, he wouldn't, no way. Then I find out he's gotten
the investigation limited to basically no one.
And I, you know, I wrote about this in my book, but it's a hundred percent true that I was on my porch swing in New Jersey looking at pictures on my phone. And there was a picture of
Yardley, you know, who was then five. Um, yeah, she was five and she had fallen off the monkey
bars like a month or two earlier. And I had been working.
I was out in San Diego covering the last day of the Democratic primary contest.
Hillary Clinton secured the nomination that day.
And my daughter fell off the top of the monkey bars and was rushed to the emergency room by a babysitter, someone other than me.
And needed several stitches.
And it was terrible. You know,
we, we all had had and have working mother guilt. And those are the moments it really springs into action. I don't have to tell you that. And, uh, that's the, and then, so two weeks
later, she got back up on those same monkey bars. She was wearing a white dress with red dots
and sneakers and her long hair was
hanging. I took a picture of hers at the top of the monkey bars, looking down all smiles
in her dress, but her sneakers. So it's like a girl, but like tough and resilient and brave.
And I saw that picture and that, that was truly the moment I said, I'm calling him. I'm calling
Lachlan Murdoch and I'm telling this story. And there needs to be a full investigation
for other women. This may be happening to four yardly. You know, I know that the Me Too movement
has been corrupted by people who used it for political reasons.
But what happened at Fox was done out of real concern for our fellow colleagues, our daughters,
and the people who had come up after us.
That's the truth.
And you, like, going door to door at Fox News and trying to get women to trust you at a time when we were not trusting each other to the contrary was incredibly courageous, J.D.
And I remember it was part of your stress, right?
Like that not only would you have told your story, but you didn't want to be known as a ringleader, which would be held against you. You know, and you didn't have the full picture for how this would shake out all these years later.
You know, that he would go down and he was he was hurting people serially and in very dark ways.
Yeah. And every day I would come home and I'd say to Sean, like, oh, you know, I talked to somebody else today and he knew it was dangerous. And when I kept doing it, I just kept trying to find others, you know, and, you know, I struggle. I, you know, I was able to write about it too. And it was really important. And, and my, I've been in therapy for 20 years and God bless Judy.
Judy. really important. And, and my, I've been in therapy for 20 years and God bless Judy, Judy,
God bless Judy. And I know you got one too. And I mean, she had to sit with me for many days,
you know, where I was very difficult. This was, this was, yeah, this was the heart,
one of the hardest things we've ever done. And, you know, and I would say people have asked me,
what do you, what, what's your advice? You my advice is, try to find some girlfriends in your place of work. There is strength in numbers. And look at what's happened. Listen, there's always going to be naughty people. There's always going to be those men, unfortunately. But I do believe we're trying to turn a corner where it's,
it's safer, I hope. And someone asked me, you know, just a few months ago, like,
do you think you're still at Fox because you're sort of like a den mother and you,
you feel like you, you can't leave there because you had to take care of others. And
I think that that's,'s something to that, too. You know, that is that is who you are.
I mean, I that was one of my main complaints about the movie Bombshell, you know, that I didn't have anything to do with was that your role didn't didn't get its proper due.
But but no one knew. It's OK.
That's listen. I mean, you.
But who cares? The bottom line is, you know what, for better, for worse, the story is it's history. It's a, it's a historic
movement, um, that where women got together and tried to do the right thing. That's the bottom
line is they just tried to do the right thing. And they had, you know, their, their husbands, my, my, my, my husband, Sean, like, you know,
the day that I went home and he told me, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happens.
You're going to lose your job. We're we'll figure it out. You have to go in and tell your story.
That's what it's about. Same. Honestly, Doug never, never hesitated.
He was like, hon, you always, you always know the right thing to do. And if, if this is what
you feel is the right thing, go do it. You and I saw the movie together. We, we were holding hands.
I think we cried throughout the entire thing, right? Like that night was so emotional.
And, you know, it came in the heels of her press tour where she'd been so negative about Fox, about me.
It was like, wow, I don't understand.
And so I kind of went into it thinking, I don't know what I'm going to get here.
I don't know what this movie is going to be about, how it's going to reflect on what happened because even though
i'm fine taking criticism i take it all the time i i view that chapter of our lives as hollowed
ground i i just i i really other the whole time and like seeing
your life portrayed up there on the big screen that you've just lived right like it came out
two years after we lived it you know it's like and i've lacked i've said before there's a reason
i repressed all of this.
Of course. I did not wish to be thrown back into that elevator on the ride up to Ailes' office.
And, you know, she looked just like me.
She did.
It was crazy.
It was crazy.
Though I don't think she sounded just like me, but she looked just like me.
No, you have a very distinctive voice.
She tried.
There were times where she tried to get it right, but it failed.
Well, she was sort of, you know, she went down here.
Right.
And I can go down there if I want, but I can also go up here. I can go all over.
It was jarring. It was jarring. It was jarring how much she looked like you, but I will say that I was disappointed when she would do
these press junkets and she would be, you know, people would say, well, how, how, how do you cover
her? You know, like, ah, F off, you know, just screw off. You have no idea. You've never even
met each other before. And she's like, well, well, it was a role and it was, you know, you people have no idea what we went through. Like,
really, you're just actors. She's never met me. She's never met. She, she gave some interviews
sort of saying when making Kelly walks into a room, I'm like, what do you, she would describe
what I'm, I'm like, we don't know each other. How do you know what I'm like when I walk into a room?
You have, you have no idea. But the only thing she really said that, that upset me. And for the
most part, I thought, you know, she was classy and she handled herself very well. But the only thing she said that I did have an issue with was somebody at one of those Q&As after the fact said something like, well, if Megyn Kelly, you know, she got harassed, why didn't she come forward when it happened. And if she really knew the story, she would have responded by saying she did come forward. She did. She went to a supervisor and told the story and they didn't
do anything. But instead she said, oh no, Megyn Kelly was late to the party. No question. She
was late to the party. Oh my gosh. Oh, I didn't know she said something like that. Yeah. And I
was like, what party was that? What? Because there
was no party before the women of Fox News stood up for themselves then against their boss. Women
were not doing that. There was no Me Too movement. Like, were you late to the party in Hollywood
with Harvey Weinstein when Rose McGowan came out and accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her? Was
she late to the party? You know, and it was like,
that is the one problem I have with,
you know, sort of comments about like that,
because, and even the movie where they had this young woman blame her harassment,
some fictional woman on me in the movie.
That's just never the way this movement shook out.
No woman who has come forward to say me too,
has been turned around. Let's say she's victim number 16
and blamed victims 1 through 15 the blame goes on the guy the guy doing it and the system that
protects him it doesn't go on the other victims who up until now didn't even see standing up as
an option right like late to what party?
Seriously, like what?
I mean, when it happened to me,
I kept a journal and kept a record.
I consulted a lawyer and opened up a case file.
I went to my supervisor and told,
I confided in other colleagues,
what more should I have done, right?
I like, I can argue both sides.
I can beat myself up and say, I should have set myself on fire to call attention to it. But realistically, the lawyer in me knows that that was an impossibility. He was the most powerful man in news. It was an
impossibility. And there was no clear roadmap for doing that and having any sort of meaningful
professional life thereafter, you know? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I, I agree. You
know, you, you just do the best you can with the circumstances that you're under and, you know,
the experience that you've had before that. And, uh, like I said, I mean, what I went through with
Roger, I could tell many stories of other terrible men that have done way worse. And I always through my career, just tried to like,
either get away from it or just forge through and, um, you know, just, just hope that I had
the ability, the wherewithal to, to make the right decisions. So no one, you know, I used to be
bothered by that too. Like, Oh, why didn't you quit? Well, you know what? That's a, that's a
really complicated answer. Would you really like to spend some time with me and find out why I by that too. Like, Oh, why didn't you quit? Well, you know what? That's a, that's a really
complicated answer. Would you really like to spend some time with me and find out why I didn't quit
instead of just judging me? You know? So I, I've heard about you. I, I, you know, we,
but we both wrote about it. I don't think I could ever, I can't read about, I can't read what I
wrote. Are you able to do that? I never go back and read it. Nope. I can't do it. I can't read what I wrote. Are you able to do that? No, I never go back and read it.
Nope.
I can't do it.
I mean, this is, I was actually not nervous, but anxious about our conversation just because,
you know, we watched that movie and I was in hysterics afterwards, almost, you know,
sort of panic attack.
Sean was there and I just had to like go get some air.
It was, it's very difficult.
It's- Well, this is the first time we've talked about it together publicly. was there and I just had to like go get some air. It was, it's very difficult. Um, it's,
well, this is the first time we've talked about it together publicly. I, when you released your book, I wasn't on the air. And when I did my reaction to the bombshell movie, which is on
YouTube, um, I couldn't have you because you're at Fox and it was, you know, they didn't, I don't
think they, I felt it would be futile to ask them for you about that particular subject.
I knew we'd get a day.
And to Fox's credit, they're letting you be here now.
And they did let you write about it.
They let me write about it.
And I will just say one other thing.
I mean, not for nothing, but perhaps appropriately, in order to get you here, we had to ask for
permission from Irina Briganti who's the head
of pr at fox and she's in the movie bombshell and i i've publicly said unkind things about her
because i didn't think she was supportive of the women at fox during the whole thing
and she's denied you know my charges against her and so on but I will tell you now I look at her differently and not just
because she let you come on the show. I actually see Irina as having been victimized by him too.
You know, he controlled her world, her paycheck, everything and her entire career.
And that situation was so pressure filled, you know, her,
you know, expected to be loyal to him. That's what was expected that prior to that day during that time and for a while thereafter. And so I'm sure it was an enormous challenge for her to
handle too. And she probably had no one to talk to about it. And I'll tell you what really made me
reevaluate her, which my two years at NBC, if you really want to love the way somebody handles PR, like she's a master at it, you know, like she, I have newfound respect for how she
handles incoming attacks on her talent because she does sort of sit in a room all day with a
machine gun trained on the outside world. So they come after Fox. Sometimes the machine gun can
kind of waver inside a little, but nobody's perfect.
And anyway, just for the record, since I've said unkind things about her, I kind of wanted
to get on the record that I think I understand her better.
And maybe one of these days we'll all go have a cocktail or something, JD.
She's always been good to me.
She's always been very kind.
And I'm grateful for that, You know, like, especially with the Cuomo stuff, you know, this is, this is difficult for Fox too, because,
you know, I'm going out there and I'm trying to be an advocate. That's a strange place for Fox to be
in or somebody in PR that's trying to, you know, I'm essentially like a, a, a talent that works
there, but I'm also somebody that's very vocal about the governor of New York that I mean, for them to be, you know, very open and very willing to, you know, let me do that on
behalf of my family. I'm grateful. I'm so grateful. And she's certainly been one of the people that
has, you know, spoken on my behalf. If you get in a dog fight, she's a great person to have on your team.
That's for sure to have to be in the bunker with you
to mix my metaphors.
Can we talk just for a minute about
being on camera and aging?
You turned 50 in May.
I'm staring down it right now, right?
It's coming.
Next Wednesday, JD, November 15th, I turn 5-0. But I'm staring down it right now, right? It's coming. Next Wednesday, JD. November 18th, I turn 5-0.
But I'm actually okay.
I consider it my fuck it 50s.
And I'm saying, bring it on.
Bring it.
You look amazing.
Listen, I'm there.
I'm glad I'm there.
I'm embracing it.
Talk to me when I'm 60.
We'll see how that goes.
But listen, it's hard.
But listen, it's hard.
We're in a business where we are looked at on a daily basis.
You try to look your best.
You know, I've always had a pretty good, I think, a pretty good gene pool.
I've definitely, like, struggled with my weight over the years.
I've gotten to a point where it's like, I'm not going to be a thin mint, but I'm okay with that.
I'm all right.
I just want to be healthy for my family. Um, uh, but yes,
of course you try to do things that are going to, you know, stop the aging process a little bit.
Um, and I know what you're getting to. I mean, listen, well, listen, I mean, we, you and I always
talk about like cosmetic options, right? Like we don't want to go under the knife necessarily, although I'm not opposed.
I'm not opposed.
But look, I have Botox.
I don't like filler.
But people will ask me a lot.
And you know what I do like?
It's something called skin tight, the skin tight laser.
And it doesn't hurt.
It just warms up your skin.
It's like this thing they put all over your face and it warms up your skin.
And apparently it stimulates collagen. But these things are damn expensive.
So I wouldn't be doing this if I were, you know, the 22 year old me. Of course, I wouldn't need it because I'd be young. But anyway, so it's expensive. I'll say that up front, but it does
work. And so obviously when you're on camera, there's even more pressure to stay looking good. And you and I talked about one of your insecurities, which was your neck.
You had some lines going like from left to right.
Like a tree trunk.
Across your neck.
They were not like a tree trunk.
Yes, let's be honest.
I mean, even when I was a kid, I had these like weird, there's an actual like real name for what it's called, but I refuse to find out what it's called. It's just like tree trunk lines.
You don't need to know. And, you know, since I met my husband, he always knew. Like, it was so funny because when I was talking to him just a few years ago, we're talking about maybe getting a neck lift, you know, not a facelift, just a neck lift because I hate my neck.
I'm definitely going to get a facelift.
When I turn 60, I'm totally getting a facelift.
I'm just putting that out there right now.
I'm going to be like Kris Jenner.
Like, I'm going to walk everybody through.
You can see the before and after. I think by that time, they'll probably have perfected it a little bit because,
you know,
I will look at stars that have gotten stuff done and been like,
it,
it looks good,
but there's something weird about it.
It looks like they've been pulled too tightly.
Something,
but I love Dolly Parton,
like from the very beginning,
like 20 years ago,
she's like,
I've been,
uh,
nip tucked and sucked,
you know,
like I just,
she's totally embraced it.
So she says in the character of Steel Magnolia's when she's in that movie, it takes some effort to look like this.
That's right. And it's true. It's it's very true.
And my husband has always known that I've had this issue with my neck.
So I always so I always would ask the doctor who
would do the Botox. I do Botox. Um, and I'm open with that. I've never done the filler before,
but I was, I would always say to him, like, have they come out with anything that can do something
with this? And I would like, you know, this neck of mine. But one day when I would go in and I'd
be like on my 20th time of saying to him, can you do something about this neck? He said, you know what? What? And he told me about this procedure that was like newly out, you know, and's not really a facelift. It wouldn't take weeks and weeks of recovery time. It was, you know, it was in the office and you would be put under anesthesia,
but it was a very simple procedure in and out. And you, you know, you would need a long weekend
to kind of recover from it. I'm like, sign me up, doc. Sounds amazing. So, you know, he gave me
paperwork to sign. I looked over it and he basically said,
you know, this is safe. You know, it's, it looks like it's effective. It's, it's sort of brand new.
Um, you'd be sort of like one of my first people, but I'm confident. And, uh, there's like you said,
it's going to stimulate your collagen and how long, you know, it'll last for a couple of years
and nobody will know. And then, uh, I, I went and did it. And I remember my husband picked
me up afterwards and my one part of my face was like, so swollen. It was, it looked, I looked
really, he just was like, are you okay? Like, yeah, okay. You know? Um, and, uh, I wasn't okay. I was, you know, I, it went wrong. It went wrong. And, you know,
a few years later, I'm learning that even though I signed on the dotted line to all of these risks
undergoing a procedure like this, it was very invasive. The doctor used heat to intentionally destroy tissue. He cut my skin. I
have scars on my neck from the place where he went in with a tube. And I'm learning about the device.
The device was very controversial and went through FDA loopholes to be considered quote unquote, quote safe, but it wasn't safe. It was, it's called
FaceTite and Fractura. So it was these two combined things and both procedures use a medical device by
this company called Invasix. So I'm learning about these things because I am involved in a,
in a lawsuit with several other women.
I remember after this happened to you, you were like, okay, it's like, of course, you're you're following and you're worried when your friend gets a cosmetic procedure.
And, you know, you just assume it's going to turn out right.
But like I always thought and I think you thought the biggest risk was like maybe it's just like well. Or, you know, maybe there's like a little downtime afterward, whatever. Um, not that like something's going to
really go wrong. And I, we met, remember we met at Sarah Beth's and it looked like you had Bell's
palsy and it was like, what's going on? You like the one side of your mouth, the left side would
not lift. You would smile and it would only go, it would only go up and the left side wouldn't move it. It's like, it was terrifying. So I've only had two, um, uh, anxiety, panic attacks in my life.
The one was the Roger Ailes thing. And the second one was doing this procedure. Um, I was off work
for two months. I remember the day I tried to go back to work and they, you know, they, they,
you know, it looked okay when I wasn't talking, but you know, when you're on television,
you project, right. You're not just in a conversation. You're like, here's the West
coast and there's a storm coming in from the Pacific. Um, you know, you're, you're exaggerated.
And I just remember I was slurring my words. It sounded like I was drunk and my, the side of my face was not, was not working properly. And I was mortified. I turned to one side for the whole report because I was just so freaked out that I, you know, that I was deformed on television.
When you had to go over to like the West coast of the, of the map, you were like,
Nope, just, no, you can figure it out. It's way over there by California. Exactly. Um, thankfully,
you know, I, I, my, my bosses, uh, Lauren Petterson and, and, you know, Suzanne Scott
had to know as well, and they were so supportive and I just felt so embarrassed. I, I was afraid
to tell my mom. I remember, you know, going, I was, it was really, I mean, I just felt so embarrassed. I, I was afraid to tell my mom. I remember,
you know, going, I was, it was really, I mean, I just thought to myself, all these things going
through your mind, like, how could I be that vain to do something like this? And I remember talking
to my mom. That's not the right question. That is not the right question. It's a visual business.
It's a visual business. And you know, even if you're not on television, if you want to do it
to make yourself feel good, there's, you know, yes, you should look into the medical risks, but I don't think
women should be shamed for being vain when they do something like that. If it's not over the top
and Kardashian, like, I don't think it's controversial. You know, my bottom line here
is absolutely do what makes you feel good. I'm not against, you know, plastic surgery or any of
those helpers that make us feel good and look good. Um, I guess my bottom line against, you know, plastic surgery or any of those helpers that make us feel good
and look good. I guess my bottom line is, you know, read what you're, what you're, you know,
you're signing to. And, and, you know, before I was always like, well, I blame myself because I
signed away, but I did not know some of the details on the equipment that was used on me, which was not safe. And that's why, you know,
many of us are trying to, you know, do something because, you know, these doctors can use devices
that that are not really looked at at the FDA. And that's, that's the scary part. That's the
scary part. So scary. It is a what I remember about that time is you were,
you were emailing your doctor, like, when's it going to start moving again? And he kept saying
like another couple of days or two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, and nothing changed. It wasn't
even getting better. So it was like, for, there's a period there, we were like, this could be
permanent. This could be the permanent state of your face. Like it's not improving at all. And, um, you finally said it's not, it's not changing. I don't, forgive me. I don't remember
exactly the words, but something like it's not, it's not getting better. And he said something
to the effect of I'm praying for you. Namaste, which is not what anyone wants to hear from their
plastic surgeon or dermatologist, whatever he was. Oh my God,
don't say namaste and don't say praying. No, it was not good. You're a man of science.
Well, and that was Sean's other day where he was like, I better not meet this doctor in the street
because, uh, yeah. Um, so listen, uh, we should state for the record. Here's the thing.
But there is still a little bit of damage that that's the thing is that there are still scars and my smile is not 100 percent, unfortunately.
And my husband will tell me like there are certain times where he'll see me and go,
it's unfortunately, you know, yes, 90 percent is there.
But there's a 10 percent there that, that still isn't a
hundred percent. And it's just a cautionary tale to, you know, um, you know, just be careful.
And, uh, and, and I, I hope like on behalf of all of these women that were really injured,
I mean, my injuries compared to the other ladies are really quite something. So I haven't reached
out to them. I'm sure they're going to deny this just for the record. I'm sure you get there.
You're the lawyer, but you were, you were that gave me very good advice to go get a second
opinion. So that was a smart move. If something happens, then it's always good to go get a second
or a third opinion because that will help you down the line if you are doing
something that I am, which is, which is trying to hold these people accountable.
Yeah. Oh, it's, it is scary. Cause it's like, you, you really are rolling the dice when you
mess with your face. And especially if you're on TV, but in any event, everybody wants their
face to look good. I remember not long after I got into television, I was looking at my face
on camera. I'm like, why is my left eyebrow so much higher than my right eyebrow?
And you just start noticing all of the irregularities of your face.
And I always knew that my left side was more attractive than my right side.
So I would always try to show the left, you know, even like the little picture of my face
on the show, the show photo.
There's a reason it's my left profile because I'm hideous on the right side.
I don't know what happened.
I am. Something happened happened my mother's womb
and i i was at a photo shoot one time and the guy's taking my picture and he's like oh yeah
i see what you mean yeah okay a little bit more profile a little bit more a little bit more more
more i was like what am i like the phantom of the opera is here. Oh, you're just ridiculous.
Well, we've been through it all.
Honestly, I was, she talks about,
you know, this is for the audience.
She talks about me being Godmama to Theodore and she's Godmama to Thatcher.
And we went through our pregnancies together.
You know, she was there when Yardley was born.
Yardley and Theodore are only six weeks apart
and he came first and then she came
and she came to my hospital bed and I went to her hospital bed and held our little
babes. You know, the parents out there know what it's like, those first few moments and days when
you're so vulnerable and you're so happy and you're also so emotional and, you know,
like the bond with your friends and the people who come through. It's just like a special moment.
I have to tell the story.
This is a great lead into
when I was in the hospital with Theodore
and you were very pregnant
and Sean had to go,
well, he had to go do something with Matthew
because I had another boy
who was two years old at the time.
So he had to go somewhere
and I was alone in the hospital room.
And man, I feel for
women when it comes to this, like, you know, you don't know how many, no matter how many times you
do it, being alone in the hospital with your baby, who's crying and you don't quite know what to do.
And you're trying to get the breastfeeding right. And there's so much pressure on you.
And I was, I was sitting there as probably almost like in tears myself because Theodore was like
crying and crying. And it was, it was late. Like you
were coming after your show and he was crying and you walked in. And I just remember you just came
over and you scooped him up and you just started singing to him. And I, I think it was like,
on a star, moonbeams home in a jar. In a jar. And be better off than you are.
So it's a song Doug's dad used to love.
Well, you sang that to him and he stopped crying.
And I was just like, oh, you're the godmother.
You're the godmother.
It was just a beautiful moment.
It was just, I'll always remember that for the rest of my life.
It was just, you know, and then you brought snacks. I remember you raided like one of the vending machines and you brought like little cookies. And so I, you know, your audience knows you, everyone loves you, obviously, that listens to your podcast. But I hope that I'm able to, you know, give these moments of like, you are a very special person, you know, to me in my life and my family. And
I just want the, you know, if you get anything from this, realize that, you know, our friendship
is real. It's forever. And you are a wonderful human being that I am so grateful in that's in my life. JD, thank you. Thank you so much. You know,
I feel the same about you. I'm so grateful to have you in my life and Sean and the boys like
Doug and I love you guys so much. And I just love what you're doing out there. And I think you're
right that some of these experiences you went through from the home invasion to the harassment
to the Don Imus thing to the Roger Ailes thing.
It's all brought you to this moment where you have to take on the most powerful man in the
state of New York, who's from a powerful family and, you know, may have an even bigger political
future ahead of him. But there's, again, mostly Sonny, who sometimes is a little cloudy. Sometimes there's a thunderstorm, a brew.
It made me think of the just like all the stuff you've done and the ALS thing.
You know, Misty Copeland, the the ballerina, she she said something like anything is possible when you have the right people there to support you.
And that's I feel like that's so true of our of our friendship and our relationship.
I'm damn grateful for it.
Love you, lady.
You too, lady.
I love you, too.
My thanks again to Janice.
I always say about Janice, if you don't get along with Janice Dean, it's you.
And now you can see why.
Oh, and by the way, Governor Cuomo, it's you.
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Don't forget to tune into the show on Monday.
Very excited to be talking to Professor Glenn Lowry and Coleman Hughes superstars together.
I have so much I want to go over with them.
They are two of the smartest people.
I listened to them all summer long when we were going through all the riots and stuff.
I just learned so much and I've been dying to bring them to you.
And I'm thrilled I get to talk to them together.
So please don't miss that.
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