When news broke about Robert Kennedy Jr’s ‘affair’ with journalist Olivia Nuzzi, the man she claims once told her ‘I would die before I hurt you’ allegedly threw her under the bus to protect his own political career.
In her new book American Canto, out Tuesday, 32-year-old Nuzzi alleges that, over the course of their relationship, Kennedy – who is 71 and married to Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines – repeatedly told her he loved her, said he would take a bullet for her, and even asked her to have his baby.
But then, after their romantic entanglement was exposed, Nuzzi claims that Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services embarked on a smear campaign, painting her as a ‘two-dimensional sex-crazed cartoon’.
‘You give me a deep-seated yearning, gnawing hunger… I need everything from you,’ she claims he once messaged her.
‘He told me he loved me… characterized what he felt as “powerful waves knocking me down.”‘
Kennedy called her, she claims, his ‘baby bird,’ ‘babydoll’ and ‘babylove,’ and lamented that she made the three-times-married politician feel free for the first time in his life.
The pair met when Nuzzi, then a reporter for New York Magazine, was doing a profile on Kennedy during his short-lived run for president in the 2024 election.
They – the journalist and her subject – then allegedly embarked on an amorous, though never physical, affair.
But word of their relationship became public in September 2024 – less than two weeks shy of the election – when Nuzzi’s then-fiancé Ryan Lizza (referred to in her book as ‘the man I did not marry’) revealed the affair to the media.
Faced with a scandal so close to the election, Kennedy called Nuzzi, she claims, and said: ‘I need you to take a bullet for me… Please.’
She writes: ‘The deal he made with the president wrought personal complication; already, his wife had told him she would not be seen with him until after the election. Now she was in Milan reading the news, hysterical, he said.
‘It was fragile, the alliance with the president. Nothing was certain.’
In Cheryl Hines’s memoir, Unscripted, published last month, she played down the scandal.
‘Of course, I hated all of it,’ she wrote. ‘The swirl of headlines, rumors, and insinuations was upsetting and overwhelming. I had hit a wall.
‘My first reaction was a wave of indifference. I didn’t care what had happened, who said what, what was real, what wasn’t real, who was involved or why they were involved.
‘I was fine with letting them all continue with the drama and the politics without me.’
But as Kennedy attempted to outrun the headlines, he allegedly switched the narrative and, in a letter to Lizza, accused Nuzzi of being a stalker.
‘The Politician read me a message he sent to the man I did not marry. It was a response, he said, to a threat he had received… He then referred to me as a stalker. Then interrupted the reading of the message to interject a comment. ‘”I’m sorry, I had to say that to exculpate myself,” he told me.’
Nuzzi concluded that Kennedy ‘was supporting what would become his case with written evidence’.
In the book, she continues: ‘The man on his third marriage, engaged in another of his innumerable affairs, would become in his narrative the unwitting victim of a woman redrawn as a two-dimensional sex-crazed cartoon.’
Kennedy then suggested they both pray for each other, she writes: ‘I prayed for him as I always did and continue to, even now. I have to assume that he prayed only for himself.’
As the story grew bigger, and Lizza threatened to make public even more salacious information, Kennedy then embarked on a ‘smear campaign’ according to Nuzzi.
‘The Politician [the name Nuzzi has apparently assigned to Kennedy throughout the book] had orchestrated a narrative in which I was not just reduced to my sexuality but into a hyper-sexualized honeypot,’ she writes.
In at least one instance, Nuzzi alleges, Kennedy ‘engineered stories’ by feeding quotes to reporters on the condition that they same the information ‘is from a source close to’ him.
She claims that her belief that Kennedy was behind these stories is confirmed by members of the media, who hoped the revelations would prompt her to retaliate in some way.
The Daily Mail has reached out to Kennedy for comment on these allegations and has not received a response.
In her book, Nuzzi claims a representative of Kennedy contacted her earlier this year to apologize.
She describes a phone conversation with someone she calls The Bodyguard, who told her Kennedy had asked how she was doing.
‘He wanted to tell you that he’s very sorry, and he wanted to express recognition… “that this has also been very difficult for Olivia, and gratitude for everything she has done to help me”.’
