It could be said that, in the year of our lord 2025, we have overused the term “cringe” to the point that it no longer has any meaning. That, in the last few years, it has gone from verb to adjective to a nonsense word that everyone is tired of.
But there is just no other term that fully captures the mental and physical feeling, the full stomach lurch, of reading the New York Times’ swooning, overwrought profile of political writer Olivia Nuzzi, who worked at New York magazine until September 2024, when it was revealed that she had been having a sextual relationship with none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — which appears to be a major plot-point in her soon to be released book, American Canto.
And isn’t that something you are just dying to know more about? Of course you are. So please, join me as we delve into the hate-read masterpiece that is Jacob Bernstein’s Olivia Nuzzi Did It All For Love — which, yes, is the actual title of this piece.
It begins!
Olivia Nuzzi loved him. She loved the politician, even though she was a political reporter and he was then a presidential candidate she had written about. She loved his eyes, “blue as the flame.” She loved that “the sight of something as trivial as a rose” could move him to tears. She loved his insatiable appetites and his “particular complications and particular darkness.”
But she said “I love you” only after he said it first. He called her “Livvy” and wrote her poems. He said he wanted her to have his baby. He promised to take a bullet for her.
Look, I try not to judge other people’s romantic inclinations (not that I succeed), but all of that sounds terrible. RFK Jr. walking through the grocery store, openly weeping by the flower stand; RFK Jr. writing poems about you; RFK Jr. coming up with a saccharine nickname for you; 71-year-old RFK Jr. telling you he wants you to have his baby, despite the fact that older paternal age is something that, unlike vaccines or circumcision or Tylenol, is actually known to be associated with a higher risk of autism; any Kennedy at all bringing up the concept of taking a bullet, when you think about it …
Just a poor time all over!
However, I am going to need to see those poems.
You could argue that referring to Kennedy and other players in the book by monikers like “the politician” is literary. It also allows her to construct a world where everyone is a sketch and proof is beside the point. Nuzzi makes clear in the book that she realizes there are people who will disagree with her version of events. She does not try to prove them. When I asked, for example, whether the text messages with Kennedy still exist, she said, “I don’t have anything to say about that.”
Not saying someone’s actual name is very literary. Like Daphne du Maurier or Carrie Bradshaw.
Nuzzi, 32, lives in a tiny house in the heart of Malibu where lizards crawl into her kitchen and the King James Bible and “The Divine Comedy” — two books she was reading while she was writing “American Canto” — sit on her dining room table. She drives around in a white Mustang convertible, like a Lana Del Rey song come to life.
See, it’s clever, because Lana Del Rey has a song called “White Mustang.”
Here she can hike in peace, though she feels hunted. Drones fly overhead; she wonders if it’s merely a coincidence.
I’m gonna say it’s a coincidence. Who is it that would be following Olivia Nuzzi around with drones, anyway? Cheryl Hines?
Guess that’s what happens when you pal around (or sext) with conspiracy theorists.
In the book, she describes Trump as a monster who “succeeded by making even those who said they loathed him behave sometimes quite like him.”
Why was he so willing to keep talking to her?
“I certainly don’t think he’s a careful reader,” she said, sucking on a vape stick as she drove toward her “favorite rock,” off the Pacific Coast Highway. “There’s a clip once where I said something to the effect of: He loves attention, women and magazines. In that order.”
Keep in mind that I am saying this as an adult woman with bangs who plays the ukulele and collects creepy Victorian medicine bottles — there really is such a thing as trying too hard to be quirky. Taking someone writing an article about you to visit your “favorite rock” is trying too hard to be quirky.
Nuzzi tried to convey that this comment was a joke, but she cannot entirely discount the possibility that being a woman and looking like the modern iteration of a Hitchcock blonde contributed to the access she got.
She steered the Mustang onto a patch of dirt on the side of the road and put on a black leather jacket that she pulled from the back seat. The rock she loved was at the edge of a vertiginous cliff, where water rolled and crashed.
Get it? Vertiginous? Because Hitchcock blonde?
“A politician’s greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one,” Nuzzi writes in her book. “And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.”
Either that or a person of any gender who runs for office.
She writes that the first few times Kennedy said he loved her, she did not say it back. Yet she knew she felt the same. “I love him, I thought. Oh no. I love him so much.” They spoke often and were intimate enough for her to see him flossing his teeth, his dopp kit overflowing with prescriptions.
Well, I guess if you can’t sleep with the one you love, watching them floss their teeth is the next best thing?
I do have some questions about the prescriptions, though, given that his whole deal is supposed to be raging at Western medicine and what have you. If he is taking anything other than horse-grade Ivermectin … the people have a right to know.
She writes that despite being “sober” for decades, Kennedy told her that he still uses psychedelics, and even smoked dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful drug on which people are known to have what feel like near-death experiences. She told him she “liked uppers. I told him that I took Adderall.”
That’s not what sober is though? That, I am pretty sure, is not just not drinking or doing heroin. The only reason I have ever even heard of “DMT” is literally because it is in a song from Hair and I could not tell you anything about it beyond that.
They chose favorite parts of each other, she writes: He chose her mouth. She chose his nose. They shared a “common language, common skepticisms, common ideas about what was beautiful, common beliefs about what was valuable.” She didn’t care that he was 39 years older than her. She liked him just the way he was. They both “moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contradictions that worked somehow in concert.”
Ew.
All I can say is, if you have “common skepticisms” with RFK Jr., you actually have more problems than the fact that you are having a sexting affair with RFK Jr..
I’m not wrong.
She describes providing him with advice about how to manage campaign issues, including the impending news that Kennedy dropped a bear carcass in Central Park.
There is not a good way to manage that, as evidenced by the fact that I do not even recall how he managed that. I just remember the bear carcass.
Oh! I have to tell you. As I was reading this, something inside me asked “But where is Carole Radziwill in all of this, and does she have something to say about RFK Jr.’s carcass habit?”
I realize you guys are not going to know what the fuck I’m talking about, but Carole is a RHONY alumni who was married to Anthony Radziwill (whose mother was Jackie O’s sister, Lee Radziwill). As it turns out, she did have something to say about RFK Jr.’s carcass habit.
“He had that weird thing about roadkill, always,” she said on a podcast this past October. “He would pick it up from the road all the time and leave it in his minivan, and sometimes he’d forget. There’d be like a skunk under the seat. His minivan always smelled of death.”
Would Nuzzi have been willing to trade in her sexy Lana Del Rey White Mustang for Kennedy’s Minivan of Skunk Death? We may never know.
But I digress!
I will note here that the timing for Nuzzi’s book is really something else, given that RFK Jr.’s wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, just released her own book — for which she’s been making the rounds the past couple weeks — a few days ago. And by “the rounds” I mean that she has been on Tucker Carlson’s internet show, the podcast hosted by Stephen Miller’s wife, and a bunch of other deeply embarrassing places. I would feel bad for her, except for that and the fact that she is now also openly embracing her husband’s conspiracy nonsense and drift to the Right … perhaps in the hope that doing so will prevent him from having another affair.
Go ahead and finish the rest if you like, I’m going to stop here or we’ll be here all day with this and I know none of us want that for ourselves. We, much like any lady hoping for a romantic connection with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., need that about as much as we need measles, whooping cough, polio or any of the other vaccine-preventable illnesses he’s so eager to see us all die from.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
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www.wonkette.com (Article Sourced Website)
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