Halperin admitted to pursuing relationships with junior colleagues and apologized for inappropriate conduct, but he denied the sexual assault claims. That basic split holds to this day. He concedes the lesser charges and disputes the gravest ones. He has not changed that posture.
The trajectory since then has two clear phases.
The first phase, from 2018 to roughly 2023, was failure. Each comeback attempt drew open mockery and got killed. The 2018 Page Six reports about meetings with CNN and PBS produced ridicule and the “Hairy Lecher” coverage. In 2019, Scarborough and Brzezinski tried to engineer a midterm web show on MSNBC, and the network scrapped it. Halperin reportedly lashed out at MSNBC chief Phil Griffin after Griffin put the kibosh on the comeback attempt. Through this stretch he issued repeated apologies, some prompted by figures like Roland Martin who told him to apologize directly to the women rather than tweet at them. The apologies bought him little.
The second phase, beginning around late 2024, is where the tide turned in his favor. The change came from a route nobody plotted in 2017. He stopped trying to get back into legacy media and built his own platform, 2WAY, launched October 2024. He also leaned right. That decision is the hinge. His revival came largely from his decision to ingratiate himself with the right, and it worked because a series of conservative women welcomed him into the fold.
The defenders now are not Halperin. They are the people who once attacked him. Megyn Kelly, who in 2017 hosted one of his accusers on the Today show and asked aloud where his apology to his victims was, brought him onto her MK Media network in March 2025. Meghan McCain, who trashed him on Twitter and on The View, joined 2WAY and framed it through “the presumption of grace and forgiveness.” The language they use is forgiveness and second chances, and it carries a partisan charge. The defense is no longer “he didn’t do it.” The defense is “people can change and the censorious left got this wrong.”
The attacks shifted to match. In 2017 the attack was the conduct itself. By 2025 the attack moved to the rehabilitation and to the enablers. The sharpest recent pieces target Kelly, not Halperin. The Daily Beast ran his accuser Eleanor McManus writing that Kelly went from MeToo ally to business partner with her abuser. Dianna Goldberg May, another woman Halperin harassed at ABC News, called the partnership a shocking abdication of all that Kelly espoused during the MeToo movement. Slate framed the whole thing as a clear formula for rehabilitating certain MeToo men. The accusers still speak, and the recurring point from them is that he never did the direct, personal repair they asked for back in 2019.
So the tide has moved, and in his direction. 2WAY hit nearly 70,000 YouTube subscribers within about seven months of its hard launch, raised $4 million in seed money, and added shows and names. The reputational rehabilitation among conservative media is largely complete. What he has not won is the argument with the women themselves, and he has not tried to on their terms. He found a constituency that does not require him to.
Slate reports June 30, 2025:
Halperin, after all, was one of the more prominent media men of #MeToo, accused of various acts of sexual assault and harassment by a dozen women. Three women said he pressed his erect penis against them through his clothes; one said he grabbed her breasts. Another said he masturbated in front of her. Others who worked with him said he propositioned them for sex. One woman, then a White House intern, had lunch with Halperin, and as media journalist Paul Farhi reported in the Washington Post, “as they stood outside the restaurant afterward, Halperin suddenly threw her up against the plate-glass facade and pinned her arms against it. Then he lunged at her, mouth agape, ‘like someone who was going to eat you.’ She said she slipped his grip, wriggled free and got away.” (At the time, Halperin denied many of the specific allegations but issued a statement: “During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me,” and apologizing that his behavior was “inappropriate and caused others pain.” He did not respond to a request for comment on this article.)
After initial reporting from CNN’s Oliver Darcy, tales of Halperin’s bad behavior poured out, as woman after woman related stories of what they said were his creepy propositions and habit of inviting young female journalists to his hotel room. He tried, many women said, to use his position to extract sex from the young, beautiful, and ambitious women with whom he surrounded himself. And that position was a vaunted one. Before these accusations were made publicly, Halperin was among the most powerful men in political journalism, scoring seven-figure salaries and writing the book Game Change and its sequel, for which he reportedly received many millions in the advance alone.
His downfall was also spectacular, coming as it did just as #MeToo felled Harvey Weinstein and gained steam. There were enough women who said Halperin had harassed or assaulted them that they started a support group, which they announced on Megyn Kelly Today, Kelly’s short-lived stint on the Today show, where the commentator lauded their courage.
The core idea of mobbing among animals is that prey species gang up on a predator they could not face alone. The benefit comes from the group, not the individual. An individual bird stands little chance against a hawk, but a flock does, and the risk to each member gets diluted. The mobbing also identifies the predator publicly. It draws attention to him so no stealth attack works. And the behavior teaches the young which threats to recognize.
That is how MeToo functioned against Halperin in 2017. Twelve women came forward. No single one of them could have ended his career. His conduct had been an open secret for years at ABC and Bloomberg, and the open secret protected him because each woman faced him alone and stayed quiet. The CNN report changed the math. Once the first accusers called, others answered, the way a mobbing call summons nearby birds. The group did what no individual could. They marked him as a predator in public, and the marking stuck for years.
Mobbing among animals is seasonal. Attacks fall off sharply between nesting seasons, because the behavior exists to protect the young, not to punish the predator. The hawk is not killed. It is driven off the territory, and when the chicks are grown the pressure relaxes. The kittiwake does not mob at all, because it nests on cliffs where no predator reaches the young, so there is nothing to defend.
From this view, the mob never aimed to destroy Halperin. It aimed to protect the nesting ground, which in 2017 was legacy newsrooms, the workplaces where the harassment happened and where junior women were at risk. He got driven out of that territory. NBC, Showtime, the book deals, all gone. Then he moved. He built 2WAY on YouTube and joined a conservative network. That is new ground, off the colony, where the original mob has no nest to defend and no standing. The pressure relaxed not because he changed but because he left the territory the mobbing existed to protect. The season ended.
The frame also explains the defectors. Megyn Kelly and Meghan McCain both joined the 2017 mob and both now sit beside him. The signaling-theory reading in the article covers this. A bird that mobs displays its own fitness and status to potential partners. The risky attack is partly a performance for an audience. In 2017 the audience rewarded the display, so Kelly hosted his accusers and asked where his apology was. By 2025 her audience changed. She runs a conservative network now, and that audience rewards the opposite display, the grace-and-forgiveness posture. The behavior tracked the payoff, not the predator.
Prey sometimes call in a stronger predator to handle the first one. Halperin did the inverse. He attached himself to a mightier protector, the conservative media ecosystem and its grievance against the censorious left, and that protector now shields him from the original mob. His defenders do not argue he is innocent. They argue the people who mobbed him were the real threat. He recruited a bigger bird.
Mark Halperin rebuilt a career after 2017 from the wreckage of NBC, Showtime, Bloomberg, HBO, and Penguin Random House, all of which cut him loose after multiple harassment allegations. The rebuild reveals the coalition he now serves.
Who does Halperin rely on for status, income, and protection?
The old answer is gone. None of the legacy institutions will have him back. His current supply chain runs through three channels. First, paying subscribers to 2WAY, the interactive video platform he founded in 2024, where community members join daily live video conferences. Second, Megyn Kelly, who brought him onto MK Media in March 2025 to host Next Up with Mark Halperin and who gives him SiriusXM distribution for The Morning Meeting on her channel. Third, Newsmax, which carries him on cable. Legacy prestige outlets play no part. His protection comes from the right-leaning independent media ecosystem that treats his 2017 fall as an MSM excess rather than a disqualifying record.
A secondary layer of protection runs through his pedigree. His father Morton Halperin worked for Henry Kissinger on the Nixon National Security Council Wikipedia and spent decades as a civil liberties figure at the ACLU and Open Society Institute. That Democratic establishment lineage gives Halperin a residual permission slip on the center-left that a pure Newsmax host lacks. He can still book Steve Elmendorf, Jim Kessler, Third Way types. The father’s reputation does work the son can no longer do on his own.
Who does he need to attract or retain as allies?
Four groups. The 2WAY subscriber base, which has to keep paying. Right-wing guests who confer legitimacy on that side: Jack Posobiec, Robby Starbuck, Mary Margaret Olohan of The Daily Wire, Jonathan Turley, Elise Stefanik, and Stephen Moore all appear on his shows. Center-left operatives who let him project a bipartisan frame rather than a partisan one: Elmendorf, Kessler, Melissa DeRosa, and Tim Rice among them. And the tight Kelly-Spicer-Turrentine independent media clique, where reputation travels fast and poaching runs both ways. When Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine launched a competing show after appearing on 2WAY, sources described Halperin as viewing it as theft of his format and audience after the investment he put into the platform. The fight exposed how narrow the ecosystem runs and how much each host depends on the others for guest flow and cross-promotion.
What beliefs and signals mark membership in his coalition?
Hostility to legacy media gatekeeping, signaled through framing rather than through direct attack. Respect for Trump as a political force to analyze rather than a pathology to denounce. Horse-race reporting treated as a serious craft. A cultivated neutral register that lets guests from The Daily Wire and from Third Way sit in the same hour without the show reading as partisan. Pro-Israel foreign policy framing. Faith in direct-to-audience subscriber economics and interactivity as the next model of news.
Membership also shows in what coalition members do not say. You do not denounce Trump in MSNBC tones. You do not join pile-ons against cancelled men, since the coalition rests on the premise that cancellation went too far. You do not treat the January 6 narrative as settled. You do not mock populist voters. You do not bring up Halperin’s past.
What might he have to give up if he changed his public position?
If he pivoted back toward the MSNBC register, he loses everything he rebuilt. The legacy outlets are not coming back for him. Kelly drops him. Newsmax drops him. Right-wing guests stop answering the phone. Subscribers churn. The center-left bookings he still lands depend on his right-flank access, not on his liberal credentials, so those dry up too.
If he went full MAGA, he loses the bipartisan frame that distinguishes 2WAY from a generic right-wing show. The Elmendorf and Kessler bookings vanish. His father’s residual cover stops working. He becomes a commentator rather than a reporter, and the Game Change brand he still trades on requires the reporter pose.
If he addressed the 2017 allegations honestly and at length, he reopens a file the coalition has agreed to leave closed. The people who might reward candor are not his customers.
If he soured on 2WAY’s subscriber model and went back to ad-supported distribution, he surrenders the one asset that belongs to him rather than to a platform that can fire him. The subscribers replaced the institutions.
Each piece of his current product holds the others in place: the polished reportorial tone, the mixed guest list, the silence on 2017, the Kelly alliance, the Newsmax appearances, the father’s name traveling quietly behind him. Remove any one and the structure weakens.
