Cheryl Hines’ apparent willingness to stand by her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is becoming increasingly surreal as disturbing and salacious new allegations about him continue to spill forth from his alleged ex-digital lover, political journalist Olivia Nuzzi, and her gossipy ex-fiancée Ryan Lizza.
It can’t have been easy for Hines to await Tuesday’s release of “American Canton,” Nuzzi’s hotly anticipated but widely panned tell-all memoir. After all, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star went to such great lengths, in her own recently published memoir, “Unscripted,” to justify staying married to Kennedy and to assert that their 11-year marriage was stronger than ever.
But journalist and podcaster Maureen Callahan, who penned a book about Kennedy women, believes she knows why the 60-year-old Hines probably won’t leave Kennedy, 71. For one thing, he’s one of the most powerful politicians in the country right now: As Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, he oversees the health care of more than 300 million Americans. In addition, Kennedy also happens to be “a member of America’s quote, unquote royal family,” Callahan, the author of “Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed,” said on her “The Nerve” podcast.
According to Callahan, Hines probably wants continued access to the Kennedy family’s wealth and fame, even though a number of Kennedy relatives, including Caroline Kennedy, have denounced her husband’s vaccine skepticism and cuts to public health, his alliance with Trump and his “addiction to attention and power.”
In her book and interviews to promote it, Hines revealed her adoration for the son of Robert F. Kennedy, according to Callahan. She “seems to be head over heels (in love) with him” and is probably willing to believe whatever he’s told her in his efforts to downplay or deny his alleged affair with Nuzzi, Callahan said.
But as Callahan said, it’s hard to imagine many wives ignoring the detailed allegations about Kennedy Jr. that have emerged via Nuzzi’s book and in Lizza’s Substack dispatches.
In her book, Nuzzi alleges that Kennedy– whom she obliquely refers to as The Politician — expressed an obsessive need for her, even though they reportedly never consummated their relationship, according to the New York Post and the Daily Mail. They met in 2023 after she was assigned to do a cover story about him for New York magazine. At the time, he was running for president, first as a Democrat, then as an Independent. They began their “digital affair,” communicating via text or FaceTime. She said he called her “babydoll” and “baby love” spoke about wanting to impregnate her, denied that he was ever infected with a parasitic brain worm and described using hallucinogenic drugs when Hines was out of town, the New York Post also reported. During a video call to Nuzzi on his 10th wedding anniversary, Kennedy turned over a framed photo of himself with his wife.
“You give me a deep-seated yearning, gnawing hunger… I need everything from you,” Nuzzi said Kennedy Jr. once messaged her, the Daily Mail reported.
But Nuzzi’s revelations about Kennedy seem anticlimactic following the even more seamy stories shared by Lizza on his Telos News Substack posts. The former New Yorker and Politico writer said he decided to spill details about his relationship with Nuzzi in order to counter her narrative about their breakup. Lizza said he kicked Nuzzi out after he learned of her affair with Kennedy in the late summer of 2024.
Nuzzi also was fired by New York Magazine, and was hoping for a journalistic comeback as the West Coast editor with Vanity Fair. But that job is reportedly up in the air, after Lizza’s Substack posts revealed Nuzzi’s alleged serious violations of journalistic ethics in her relationship with Kennedy, Page Six reported.
On Substack, LIzza said Nuzzi and Kennedy planned to consummate their relationship in August 2024, after Kennedy ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump. Lizza also shared Nuzzi’s claims that Kennedy was a “sex addict” who had been having multiple affairs with unidentified woman during their alleged digital affair. Lizza moreover published erotic poetry that he said Kennedy texted to Nuzzi, including one string of text that described a certain raunchy sex act.
“I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love,” Kennedy Jr. wrote, according to Lizza’s Nov. 21 Substack post.
With such disclosures, Callahan declared: “Cheryl, pick up your pride, wherever you left it. Pick up your dignity. … And get a shark off a lawyer and leave this guy.”
On her show, Callahan and her producer, Marlaina Schiavo, also discussed their theories about Hines’ attachment to Kennedy.
According to Hines’ memoir, she grew up in “humble beginnings” and at one point lived in a trailer park, Schiavo said. “Now she has an invitation to the Cape,” Schiavo said. Hines became a B-list TV celebrity with “Curbed Your Enthusiasm” but her marriage to Kennedy “took it to the next level” and “it’s kind of hard to downshift once you get there, right?” Schiavo added.
Callahan said her reporting on Kennedy women showed that the “alpha Kennedy men” liked to marry their groupies. and Hines, too, “is a fan,” which means she will put up with “all manner of humiliation, infidelity and risk to her health and reputation.” But to such women, “being a Kennedy wife is worth it,” Callahan said.
But Callahan said she’s not inclined to be sympathetic to anyone in the sex quadrangle, including Hines, noting that she flaunted her relationship with Kennedy Jr. and his children, while he was still married, though separated, from his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. Before she died by suicide in 2012, Richardson Kennedy famously found her husband’s 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.
“When Mary Richardson Kennedy was decompensating, (Hines) was awful to her,” Callahan said. That said, if Hines were smart, she would regard leaving Kennedy as finally “liberating herself.”
Hines also could be welcomed back in the Hollywood fold by by her liberal friends, who mostly rejected her after she joined her husband’s alliance with Trump, Callahan said. She just needs to renounce her husband, Trump and the MAGA movement and say she was “brainwashed,” Callahan said.