When NBC abruptly reneged on their $69 million, three-year contract with Megyn Kelly after an insensitive but obviously unintentional gaffe about blackface, some — myself included — hypothesized that the overhyped incident was simply a convenient excuse for something else. Nearly a year later, Ronan Farrow's explosive reporting on the lengths NBC went to shut down his investigation into Harvey Weinstein grants further credence to an unpalatable, sexist, and abhorrent rationale for Kelly's firing: NBC wanted to silence Kelly's coverage of their former anchor, Matt Lauer.

In the weeks before the blackface nothingburger, Kelly spent ample amounts of time on her talk show reporting on the numerous sexual assault and harassment allegations plaguing Lauer. Unlike many of her fellow daytime hosts, Kelly had covered the #MeToo beat in scrupulous and, at times, necessarily unsavory detail: conducting explosive interviews with multiple Weinstein victims, and when the Lauer story broke and his termination from NBC came shortly thereafter, Kelly covered it with the same righteous indignation.

On live television, Kelly called on her own employers to allow an external team to investigate the network's handling of the entire Lauer affair, and she went so far as to interview one of Lauer's accuser on air.

It's a massive gamble to criticize the ethics of your own employer on national television, but Kelly rightly made that bet. And NBC fired her for it. We can be more confident thanks to new reporting by Farrow.

NBC has long maintained that they had no knowledge of Lauer's malfeasance until November of 2017, when the first allegation went public and they promptly terminated him. But Farrow has revealed that Harvey Weinstein dangled the Lauer allegations as leverage to convince NBC to shut down Farrow's impending expose of Weinstein. NBC ultimately fired Farrow, and the New Yorker published his investigation in October. So NBC had a minimum of one month's prior knowledge that Lauer had allegedly raped someone, yet they went so far as to fire Farrow to cover it up.

If NBC was willing to fire a reporter for a story that might result in exposing Lauer's misconduct, then it logically follows that they would fire a reporter covering the Lauer story months later on national television. With Kelly coming from Fox, and given NBC's clearly broken corporate culture, the knives were out for her upon her arrival. But surely the network knew they had just bought an anchor who prioritizes the truth over popularity. After all, they spent $69 million dollars to acquire her.

NBC just didn't expect that Kelly would report on them as well.

Lending further credibility to the theory that this got her fired is a separate report from multiple tabloid outlets claiming that Lauer wants to give his first interview following the scandal to none other than Tamron Hall. Hall, whom NBC booted from the Today Show to grant Kelly her hour, made no secret of her schadenfreude felt after Kelly's termination, and given Lauer's indignant denial of the allegations and persistent rumors throughout Kelly's tenure that NBC colleagues wanted Lauer back, the interview report seems fully possible — at least prior to the publication of Farrow's reporting.

Farrow's book, Catch and Kill, drops next week. Surely it contains other bombshells about NBC's cover-up of the Lauer debacle. But so far, Kelly looks better and better.