It's Megyn Kelly NOT Megan Kelly. Here's why the NBC host spells her name differently.
Megyn Kelly‘s fate with NBC will reportedly be decided Friday — or maybe it’s been decided? — but either way speculation is rampant and she’s been trending for days. Or at least “Megan Kelly” has been.
People searching for the latest news on the TV personality, who found herself at the center of a controversy Tuesday for defending blackface while discussing controversial Halloween costumes (she later apologized), have been misspelling her name when searching for her, according to Google Trends.
Kelly discussed the origins of her creatively spelled name with the website NameCandy in 2009. The name Megan and variants like Meghan have long been extremely popular in the United States, especially in the ’80s and early ’90s, but Megyn has never been, per the Social Security Administration’s records.
“‘Megyn’ is the spelling on my birth certificate,” Kelly told the website said in 2009. “My parents suspected I would be a boy, and had chosen two potential boy names for me. Turned out they were wrong, and needed a girl name pronto. My mom had first heard the name [Megan] a week or so before I was born — while popular today, it really wasn’t in the ’70s. They both liked it, but hadn’t given any thought to spelling it and, on the fly, they went with what turns out to be the Welsh spelling, Megyn.”
The journalist, who got her start as an attorney, said that when she was “a little girl,” born in Illinois and then raised in upstate New York, “I hated the non-traditional spelling because I wanted the monogrammed mugs, plaques, and other things with the name on them — always spelled ‘Megan.’ Now I like the unusual spelling, and some of our viewers tell me they’ve actually adopted it for their own little ‘Megyns.'”
This isn’t the first time people have been confused about the Megyn versus Megan thing. In 2015, a Pittsburgh woman named Megan Kelly made headlines after she started getting an influx of emails meant for the then-Fox News host. The woman said she was getting one to two emails a week requesting autographed pictures or political analysis (when they weren’t hate letters) and it picked up after Kelly moderated the first GOP primary debate in August of that year.
A decision about Kelly’s future with the network, which secured a 3-year deal with her in January 2017 for a reported $69 million, is expected on Friday (though there is a lot of unofficial gossip that she’s out). Kelly secured top Hollywood litigator, Bryan Freedman, to represent her. NBC has not responded to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment and has only said, “Given the circumstances, Megyn Kelly Today will be on tape the rest of the week.”
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