Megyn Kelly Defended Sydney Sweeney. Then Called Female Athletes a Slur.
The conservative host said the Novig backlash was politically driven, blamed critics for targeting a registered Republican, and dropped a barnyard slur about female athletes in the same breath. The numbers say the original controversy already ended in Sweeney's favor.
Beam Me Over ↓
Megyn Kelly spent time on her show this week defending Sydney Sweeney against the backlash to the Novig "Just Sports" campaign. She called it a "predictable leftist feminist meltdown." Then she called female athletes who objected a barnyard slur. The defense became a different story entirely.
"Since the dawn of time"
Kelly's core argument: sex has always sold sports to men and this ad is no different. "Since the dawn of time, we've been selling sports to men by using sexy women in ads," Kelly said. "Men tend to like sports and beer and sexy women, and this is not particularly controversial, until now." Her guest, conservative commentator Emily Jashinsky, agreed that critics of the ad made "an incredible stretch."
Kelly also reduced the ad to a pure message claim: "She just said, 'Sports. Sports. This is sports.'" On Sweeney's appearance she added: "It would be a tragedy if that woman didn't occasionally show off that body. If I looked like that, I'd be doing nude ads too."
Then came the slur
The defense hit a wall when Kelly addressed the athlete critics directly. "Some female athletes are p****, but I don't get it," she said, using a slur, before adding: "I'm all for female athletes." The comment generated its own headlines within hours of the segment.
Who was actually criticizing the ad
Among the athletes who had spoken out: British sprinter Amy Hunt and former US gymnast Gracie Kramer. Kramer posted: "I don't know what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like." Neither responded publicly to Kelly's comments at press time.
The Republican read
The most distinctive element of Kelly's argument was the political framing. Kelly argued the backlash was driven not by the imagery but by Sweeney's registered Republican voter status, on record since June 2024. "She must be punished," Kelly said of the critics' alleged motive. "Because she's a Republican." That framing makes a brand ad into a partisan flashpoint, which is a different argument than the one athlete critics were making about body standards in sports marketing.
What the numbers already show
The data cuts against the meltdown narrative. According to Social Blade data cited by USA Today, Sweeney initially lost roughly 137,000 Instagram followers on September 13 and another 66,000 the next day. By September 19, she had recovered all of them and added approximately 80,000 more, pushing her total above 26 million. The Novig video surpassed 63 million Instagram views. Novig's own account climbed from approximately 37,000 to 93,000 followers since the ad launched, a 151 percent increase.
Sweeney's "meltdown" cycle appears to have ended with both her and Novig in materially better positions than before the campaign. Kelly's intervention has opened a fresh news cycle of its own.
Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site with no affiliation to Sydney Sweeney, Megyn Kelly, Novig, or any party named in this article. Every attribution above is sourced to the outlets linked in the text and listed below.
Sources & further reading
- Reality Tea: Megyn Kelly Calls Female Athletes a Slur While Defending Sydney Sweeney
- Yahoo: Megyn Kelly sticks up for Sydney Sweeney, blames furor on GOP ties
- Reality Tea: Sydney Sweeney Won Back Followers Lost to Novig Ad Backlash
- Wikimedia Commons: Sydney Sweeney at BFI LFF 2025 (photo: Raph_PH, CC BY 4.0)
- Wikimedia Commons: Megyn Kelly 2024 (photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)
