Megyn Kelly blasted media personality Keith Olbermann after he accused his ex-girlfriend, MSNBC’s Katy Tur, of physical abuse and various other misdeeds in a bizarre segment on his podcast this week.
Kelly played a portion of the Dec. 6 episode of Olbermann’s podcast, which he dedicated entirely to taking down his former lover.
The left-leaning Olbermann, who hosted shows on MSNBC and ESPN, claimed Tur once physically attacked him because the apartment they shared was too dirty and pushed him to ghostwrite her book about Donald Trump in 2017, among various other gripes.
Kelly and her guests, the co-hosts of “The Fifth Column” podcast, expressed shock over the “weird” rant and “15-minute diatribe.”
“It just leads him down a lane where he decided to tell about 25 secrets about Katy Tur,” Kelly said during Tuesday’s podcast. “The segment is called something like ‘secrets I said I’d never tell.’ Well, that’s a great name for a segment, but it really makes you a terrible person.”
Olbermann said he had “remained silent” for years but decided to speak out because he had snapped after Tur and her husband, CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil, publicized Dokoupil’s vasectomy procedure. The couple married in 2017 and have two young children.
Tur, host of the “Katy Tur Report,” penned “Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History,” which came out in 2017.
“On January 22, 2017, Katy Tur of MSNBC asked me to write her Trump book for her. She was serious and there are receipts,” Olberman said. “So all of this time, I have remained silent about the nearly three years she and I lived together and the eight years after that I remained her good and loyal friend.”
The two were in a relationship between 2006 and 2009.
“I have remained silent even though six days after her emergency appendectomy in 2007, she started punching and slapping me, with real intent to do harm, because the living room wasn’t clean enough in our place,” Olbermann continued. “How exactly do you even try to defend yourself against a woman 125 pounds lighter and a foot shorter than you?”
The Post has reached out to MSNBC for Tur’s comment on Olbermann’s remarks.
After the clip played, Kelly accused Olbermann of having a “disproportionate” response to “minor slights.”
“I don’t know what’s happened there, but it’s very trainwrecky to watch an ex – both of these people are public figures – to go public with this list of grievances and try to take down a woman who’s clearly moved on, she’s married to somebody else, her career’s fine,” Kelly said.
“His career seems, I don’t know. His podcast is very entertaining, I’m sure it’s doing…I don’t know how it’s going. But bitter, bitter, bitter,” she added.
One of Kelly’s guests, “Fifth Column” co-host Kmele Foster, chimed in to agree.
“There’s something terribly ironic about pushing grievances while insisting that you kept these secrets for a very long time, and you’re chastising her for talking about a medical procedure in public while you’re just airing all of your dirty laundry,” Foster said.
“I certainly wouldn’t dismiss claims that you’ve been attacked, that there was some sort of domestic violence in your relationship. The fact that you carried on a relationship afterwards and were very friendly until you decided not to be? This is just really strange. It’s a bizarre sort of way to snap,” Foster added.
“He’s a mean guy. He really is a mean guy,” Kelly replied. “I should temper my criticism, because I don’t really know Keith Olbermann at all. I just know that when he makes headlines on Twitter or on his show, nine times out of ten, he’s being absolutely caustic about somebody with whom he was once close.”
“It’s one thing to have strong opinions about the news, God bless, that’s what he gets paid to do. It’s quite another to be going after people personally with your microphone, people you used to live with, people you used to love. Anyway, the whole thing is awkward,” she added.
In September, Olbermann drew online mockery after he boasted about dating Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
