Cheryl Hines’ memoir, “Unscripted,” hasn’t raced up any best-seller lists, so it’s up to Olivia Nuzzi, her husband Robert F. Kennedy’s reported “digital” lover, to deliver the hit tome that may give Americans insight into the controversial anti-vaccine campaigner who broke with his famous political family to ally himself with President Donald Trump and to put his own stamp on America’s health care system.
But judging from an excerpt of Nuzzi’s upcoming book, “American Canto,” which was published in Vanity Fair Monday, any reader will have to wade through the disgraced journalist’s literary pretensions and stubbornly elliptical language to get to anything that resembles an account of her supposedly steamy non-physical love affair with Kennedy.
One concrete thing that the former New York Magazine political reporter reveals is that Kennedy told her he didn’t have a worm in his brain, contrary to what was reported during his failed 2024 presidential campaign. Nuzzi said that the man she refers to as “The Politician” would often try to soothe her concerns over the apparent dead worm found in his brain, telling her in one of their sexually charged text exchanges: “Baby, don’t worry.”
During the campaign, Nuzzi was assigned to write a profile of Kennedy for New York Magazine, with their interview reportedly leading to a tryst that she carefully alludes to in her book. She writes about falling under the spell of The Politician. “I loved his brain,” she writes. “I hated the idea of an intruder therein.” Nuzzi said she did “not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny.”
Nuzzi also said: “Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm.”
That’s when The Politician told her to not worry. “It’s not a worm,” she said he told her. He also claimed that a doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times and and concluded that “the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all.”
“It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain,” Nuzzi said.
It’s hard to know how much weight to give to Nuzzi’s account of the brain worm discussion, or whether to rely on what The Politician told her about this particular health issue. Meanwhile, Nuzzi offers another memorable passage about The Politician’s other super-human quality — the way he showed desire.
“He desired,” Nuzzi writes. “He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.”
The revelation about Nuzzi’s reported affair with Kennedy derailed her hot-shot career as a young political journalist, largely because she never disclosed her relationship to her bosses at New York Magazine while she was covering the 2024 campaign.
Nuzzi’s self-described mentor, journalist Kara Swisher, told the magazine’s senior leadership after she learned about Kennedy, according to a New York Times profile of Nuzzi. “She just needed to come clean and she never did,” Swisher said. “It was a betrayal of the audience.”
After Nuzzi was fired from the magazine, she also underwent a very public breakup from Ryan Lizza, another prominent political journalist. As the New York Times reported, Kennedy also tried to brush Nuzzi off, claiming he had only met her once for the “hit piece” she wrote about him. Kennedy then publicly reconciled with Hines as he threw his support behind Trump in exchange for becoming a cabinet secretary in his administration.
Nuzzi’s career isn’t exactly over, though. Her book, with its Kennedy revelations, is due to be published Dec. 2 and may sell better than Hines’ book, in part because she has some in the New York media scene pushing for her. Jacob Bernstein, the author of the New York Times profile, called her “a very good writer” and “a startling, complex person.” Meanwhile, Condé Nast has hired Nuzzi to be Vanity Fair’s new West Coast editor.
Hines appears to be similarly evasive about the uncomfortable truths about Kennedy in her memoir, according to a review in the Times UK.
Like other men in the Kennedy family, the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of John F. Kennedy also is famous for his philandering, the Times said. Before his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, died by suicide in 2012, she found her husband’s secret sex diary in which he admitted to having “lust demons” and “wild impulses,” while listing 37 women with whom he said he had some kind of sexual relationship.
In 2024, a woman named Eliza Cooney came forward to accuse him of sexual assault — she claimed he groped her while she was working for him and Mary Kennedy as a part-time babysitter for their children.
Kennedy has publicly admitted he is “not a church boy” who has “so many skeletons in my closet.” But Hines’ book, which the Times called “a Herculean feat of narrative omission and overblown fantasy,” doesn’t even try to address any of those skeletons. Notably, it makes no mention of the babysitter or of Mary Richardson Kennedy. She and Kennedy were still married — though separated — when he began to date Hines.
The only time Hines comes close to talking about Kennedy’s alleged bad behavior with women is when she writes about Nuzzi, The Times said. Hines, who declines to use Nuzzi’s name, writes that news of her husband’s personal relationship with Nuzzi broke while she was skiing in Italy. Upon her return, Hines said Kennedy picked her up from the airport. “For the next few days, we stopped everything and drilled down on the truth,” she wrote. “We locked ourselves in our room and laid it all on the table . . . Through those soul-searching days, we tightened our ties that bind.”