Thank-you notes!

If you’re having trouble reading those notes, try O’Reilly’s website, where he has offered transcripts. After an apparent baby shower, Kelly sent these words to O’Reilly:

Dear Bill: What a class act you are, coming to my baby shower. I was truly touched – I know how busy you are, especially that time of day. It meant a lot to me + Doug. And thank you for the darling bodysuits + snuggly – it’s hard to believe will soon have a little human being in our lives tiny enough to fit in the, You’ve become a dear friend (no matter what you say) + I am grateful to have you in my life. -Megyn & Doug [Brunt, Kelly’s husband]

Another one relates to an O’Reilly plug for a book by Brunt.

What do these notes show? That Kelly is a woman who’s classy enough to write substantive thank-you notes. And that O’Reilly is enough of a skunk to trot them out for the exigencies of crisis communications.

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The message here is that somehow Kelly is a two-faced television star. Why else would she express her appreciation for O’Reilly in private and then proceed to trash him on television, as she did Monday morning on her NBC News program? For those who may have missed it, Kelly unveiled part of an email that she’d sent to her bosses this past November to complain about how O’Reilly had shouted her down on a CBS News appearance for going public about her sexual-harassment experience with former and late Fox News chief Roger Ailes. The purpose of Kelly’s disclosure was to counter O’Reilly’s suggestions that his behavior at Fox News hadn’t drawn complaints. “O’Reilly’s suggestion that no one ever complained about his behavior is false,” said Kelly. “I know because I complained.”

One point of clarification: Kelly didn’t complain that O’Reilly had sexually harassed her, merely that his attitude toward complaints threatened to suppress them.

And guess what? There’s no news behind O’Reilly’s thank-you-note disclosures. It’s not as if Kelly has ever kept secret her appreciation for O’Reilly’s assistance at Fox News. Before she became a killer prime-time anchor, she worked the Supreme Court beat and then daytime anchor slots. In her November 2016 memoir “Settle for More,” Kelly writes about how she did an O’Reilly segment regarding Anna Nicole Smith. “Bill loved it,” writes Kelly, noting that her producer said O’Reilly had concluded that Kelly was “a star. I want her on every week.”

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That was a big break for me. A regular weekly primetime gig would expose me to a much bigger audience than my mostly daytime reporting had. Not only did Bill introduce me to his audience, he treated me as an authority figure. He let viewers see that he respected me. He asked me to cover big news stories. It was a segment I would do faithfully for the next ten years. Bill was generous with his time and advice. He was always happy to sit down with me and offer his opinion, and I considered him a friend. I helped him too, taking time off to raise money for his daughter’s school, helping him to promote his books, defending him publicly when he came under attack for this thing or that. We liked each other and had a great rapport.

The bonhomie trended toward rivalry once Kelly in 2013 became a prime-time star at the 9 p.m. hour, benefiting from a great lead-in from “The O’Reilly Factor.” Over time, O’Reilly grew less unequivocally supportive of Kelly — like the time in January 2016 that he failed to stick up for his colleague in the face of attacks from Trump.

Now he is attempting to discredit Kelly by publishing personal notes. It won’t work. Kelly, mind you, was fact-checking O’Reilly on a very specific point that he has made repeatedly in a vain attempt to defend his awful record. Her words on “Megyn Kelly Today” neither contradict nor negate those notes or the appreciation that she expressed in her book. The world is a complicated place, especially for colleagues of Bill O’Reilly.

To add to the weirdness, O’Reilly also published a thank-you note from Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued Ailes for sexual harassment. She never accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment, though she did criticize him over the weekend after the New York Times report.

The note release, mind you, is a shopworn strategy. After Carlson sued Ailes in July 2016, Fox News released Carlson’s conciliatory handwritten notes to Ailes. As if they proved a damn thing.

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Thank you, O’Reilly, for documenting that Kelly and Carlson were brought up the right way. And for reminding women that as long as there are men like you kicking around, good deeds will never go unpunished.

Speaking with Glenn Beck on Monday, O’Reilly cited the notes, plus an affidavit from one of his accusers, as proof of … something. “A picture should start to emerge for any fair-minded person, and that’s all I can hope for — that the American people will see that this is an attack on an American citizen, me, for political purposes,” said O’Reilly, repeating the excuse that he cited every time he came under attack at Fox News. Media Matters has a vendetta against me!