Ousted daytime show host Megyn Kelly is expected to leave NBC officially as early as next week with more than $30 million, which is the remainder of her three-year, $69 million contract with the network, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Kelly’s lawyers and NBC officials have been arguing over “nonfinancial” issues for the past several weeks, including noncompete and nondisclosure agreements.
Kelly was less than half-way through her three-year contract when she was booted off the network and her show was cancelled last month, just hours after she defended the use of blackface for Halloween costumes live on-air. Kelly later apologized and even suggested she didn’t know the racist history of blackface until that day.
While blackface-gate might have been the final straw, officials had been in talks for some time about Kelly’s departure. Some NBC News executives were wary of how well Kelly would perform from the start, given she was moving from doing hard news interviews at Fox News to a day time show.
“We were a baseball team and we signed a free-agent running back,” one senior NBC News executive told WSJ.
