Megyn Kelly called Mike Repole a big man and Irad Ortiz a hero. She had sixty seconds and one question that would have made both of those things mean something. She didn’t take it.
You Can’t Fix a Sport That Involves Animals and Gambling While You Passively Condone Cockfighting, Animal Torture, and Illegal Gambling Within It.
Let me tell you what Megyn Kelly’s interview with Mike Repole actually was, and what it wasn’t.
It wasn’t a victory lap. Repole’s horse Renegade finished second in the 2026 Kentucky Derby. His jockey, Irad Ortiz Jr., was beaten at the wire by his own brother Jose. The emotional hook was the consolation, an owner lifting his jockey after a heartbreaking near-miss, the almost unbearably human drama of two brothers going at each other down the Churchill Downs stretch. Great television. Compelling stuff. The kind of segment that fills twenty minutes without a single hard question and leaves everybody feeling warm.
And Megyn Kelly, who has made an entire career out of asking the hard questions, who has built a brand on the premise that she is not that kind of journalist, delivered exactly that kind of journalism.
Zero about The Federal Felony.
She called Repole a “big man.” She called Irad a hero. She celebrated the authenticity, the humanity, the grace under pressure. She talked about douchebags, there are so many of them out there, she said and how refreshing it is to find someone who isn’t one. She did all of this while the documented public record of a federal felony involving the two men at the center of her conversation sat completely untouched.
Badasses, Megyn, don’t torture animals. And badasses don’t show up to an interview unprepared, or prepared and silent. Pick one. Neither is good. JS
What the Record Shows
This is not a new story. It is not a rumor. It is not a social media allegation that evaporated under scrutiny.
On November 23, 2025, a video was posted on X appearing to show Irad and Jose Ortiz collecting cash bets inside a cockfighting ring in Puerto Rico. Cockfighting has been a federal felony in every U.S. state and territory including Puerto Rico since the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill. The maximum penalty is five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Spectators face up to a year. The Ortiz brothers, by all visible evidence, were not spectators. They were working the ring. They have corroborated the video is authentic.
In January 2026, PETA sent formal letters to the Eclipse Awards asking that both brothers be barred from future Outstanding Jockey consideration. In May, USA Today put the story in front of a national sports audience with additional social media documentation, photos, promotional posts, a named tournament showing the brothers as active participants, not casual observers. The Kentucky Horse Racing and Gaming Corporation investigated in November 2025, met with the jockeys, and took no action. The New York State Gaming Commission has not responded. According to Animal Wellness Action, there has not been a single known federal enforcement action targeting cockfighting in Puerto Rico.
That is the record. It has been the record for seven months. It was the record when Megyn Kelly sat down with Mike Repole and talked about badasses and heroes and how many douchebags there are in the world.
I want to be fair. We don’t know what’s on the edit floor. We don’t know what was asked and cut. What aired is what aired. And if the question was asked and edited out, that is a different kind of failure but it is still a failure. Either way, the audience got a love fest. Either way, nobody got the truth.
She Knows Better. She’s Made Her Career Knowing Better.
Megyn Kelly does not get the grace I’m about to extend to Mike Repole. She is not an owner blinded by loyalty to his jockey. She is a journalist or at least someone who markets herself as one, whose entire value proposition is that she asks what nobody else will ask.
She had one question. Sixty seconds. She didn’t need to convict anyone. She didn’t need to be hostile. She needed to be a journalist. “Mike, there’s documented reporting about the Ortiz brothers and cockfighting, a federal felony. Has that been addressed?” That’s it. Thirty words. One breath. She didn’t take it.
The most generous interpretation that she simply didn’t know is not more forgiving. It is its own indictment. This story has been in the public record since November 2025. USA Today put it in front of a national audience in May. We broke it last November. If Kelly’s team booked a horse racing segment built around the Ortiz brothers and didn’t know any of this, that is not bad luck. That is not doing the homework. And not doing the homework, at her level, with her platform, on her brand promise, is a choice.
She celebrated Repole’s philosophy on authenticity. She nodded along when he said real friends tell you the hard truth even pointing out that his closest friends recently gave him grief about the food quality on his private plane, because that’s what real friends do. They tell you what you don’t want to hear.
Megyn Kelly had a chance to be that. She chose the private plane food.
A Word About Mike Repole — And I Mean This
I have written about this story since November 2025. I want to say something now that I have said before and mean just as much today: I do not write this to hurt Mike Repole or the Ortiz brothers. I write it to help them. There is a difference, and it matters.
Mike Repole is, in my honest assessment, leaps and bounds ahead of most of his peers when it comes to genuine investment in this sport. He doesn’t just talk about making racing better. He puts money, time, and credibility behind it. He is willing to take positions that cost him something. In a sport populated by people who will tell you everything that’s wrong over dinner and look the other way by morning, that is not nothing. I generally support what he is trying to do, and I don’t need to agree with everything a person does to support them. Anyone who has followed politics for five minutes understands that.
But I’ve always said: never listen to a trainer tell you why he likes his horse. He looks at that animal the way a parent looks at a child. Objectivity left the building a long time ago. Mike Repole views Irad Ortiz like a nephew. He calls himself Uncle Mike. When that kind of love is in the room, even the best people develop blind spots. That is not a character indictment. That is being human.
Here is what I would say to him directly: You had a platform on that show. A national one. A word from you not a condemnation, not a legal argument, just an acknowledgment that this story exists and deserves a real answer would have meant something. It would have separated you from the very people you’ve been fighting. The ones who look away when something is inconvenient, who protect the powerful and leave the hard questions for someone else. You are not supposed to be those people. And I don’t think you want to be.
His own interview said it best. Real friends tell you the hard truth. His close friends complained about the food on his private plane. I’m telling him something harder than that, and I’m doing it for the same reason, because I’m on his side. I told him face to face.
The story is not going away. The federal exposure is real. The longer it goes unaddressed, the worse it gets for everyone attached to it. The people giving the brothers and their owner standing ovations on national television are not helping them. I am.
One more thing, because in racing I take a back seat to nobody. Mike said Irad rode a perfect race. With respect, that is not correct, and the head-on view out of the gate will demonstrate as much. I made my living watching races and seeing them for exactly what they are not what we want them to be. Irad broke from the rail and you could tell immediately it was in his head. Watch how quickly he moves Renegade into the two path, that is not a tactical decision, that is an overreaction to a draw. The old Churchill Downs conventional wisdom about the rail being a death sentence has not applied to the current configuration, but Irad rode it like it did. That overreaction caused the very first bump Renegade absorbed, which started a chain reaction of trouble that followed him through the early going. If Irad rides his horse and rides his race, if he drops back out of the traffic instead of overthinking the draw and forcing position, Mike Repole may not be 0-for-13 in the Kentucky Derby. The race wasn’t perfect. It was human. And sometimes the most honest thing a friend can do is say so.
Monaco, the True Sport of Kings, and the One Thing Money Can’t Buy
I have written many times in these pages about the parallel between horse racing and Formula One, two sports I love deeply, one of which I have spent my life inside. I have always maintained that Formula One is the true sport of kings. Not because of the money. Because of what the sport demands of everyone in it: a standard of conduct, a respect for tradition, a certain bearing that the paddock guards jealously regardless of your net worth.
At the recent Monaco Grand Prix, Kim Kardashian now romantically linked to Lewis Hamilton was approached on the grid by Martin Brundle during his legendary pre-race walk. Brundle’s grid walk is Formula One pageantry at its most essential. He has been doing it a while. He is universally respected. Being stopped by Martin Brundle on the Monaco grid is not an inconvenience. It is an honor. She brushed him off, didn’t know who he was, didn’t care, or both.
Then, walking past a highly visible platform near the winning driver’s podium where a towel had been placed, by tradition, for the winning driver, she picked it up and wiped the sweat from her own forehead.
Megyn Kelly noted that Mike Repole is reportedly worth over two and a half billion dollars. She celebrated that he’s still “Mike from Queens.” Good for him. I mean that. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
Money can buy almost anything. Almost.
It can buy access. It can buy platforms. It can buy companies. It can buy horses and broadcast deals and the best agents in the sport and twenty minutes on a national show where nobody asks you a hard question. It can even buy love. It cannot buy class. Class is something you have, something you exude, something you show or you don’t.
Accountability works exactly the same way.
We’re Still Here
Past The Wire broke this story in November 2025. We have tracked the regulatory non-response. We have reached out. We have documented the institutional silence at every level, the racing commissions, the governance bodies, the federal authorities who have yet to act.
We are a small publication. We will not out-reach Megyn Kelly’s audience. We will not out-spend the platforms that turned a documented federal felony into a feel-good segment about badasses and heroes. We understand the math.
But we will be on the record. We will be dated. And when this story reaches its conclusion, whatever that conclusion is, the record will show who asked the questions and who celebrated the feelings. We have one question for Megyn Kelly. Just one. Why would a journalist who has built her career on holding the powerful accountable passively condone animal torture and illegal gambling, in a gambling sport, by staying silent about two of its most prominent figures?
What does passively condoning cockfighting actually mean? Suggested reading: Here you go.
In the film Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s William Munny is asked about a man he just shot. “What about him?” someone says, pointing to his partner. “Nothing,” Munny says. “He’s my friend.” The cockfighting story has been in the public record for seven months. The interview was twenty minutes long. Nothing about the federal felony. Nothing. He’s my friend.
You can watch the Megyn Kelly interview with Mike Repole here:
Related Coverage: Six Months Later, All About the Horse, The Psychology of Complicity, Problem or Solution
