There was a moment last year when Cheryl Hines could have and should have made a clean break from Robert Kennedy Jr. It was when Kennedy’s relationship/affair with Olivia Nuzzi was outed last fall, and as we know now, Nuzzi had been trying to install herself as the next Mrs. RFK Jr.. Cheryl was reportedly pissed off and she left Kennedy for like a month or something, but she’s spent much of the past fourteen months as a MAGA wife in Washington, trying and failing to defend her horrid, unhinged husband. She’s not even particularly popular in MAGA circles – Trump treats her like sh-t, and I have no doubt that Kennedy cheats on her constantly. Well, this week, Cheryl decided to take aim at… the Kennedy family. The same family which tried to warn Americans about Cheryl’s husband.
Cheryl Hines knew when she tied the knot with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2014 that she was marrying into a complicated family, but things grew significantly more difficult a decade into her marriage as loved ones publicly turned on Bobby. During a sit-down on NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star got candid about the Kennedy family dynamic since her husband joined President Donald Trump’s administration as his secretary of health and human services.
Five of Bobby’s siblings — Kerry, Kathleen, Courtney, Chris and Rory — shared a statement calling Bobby’s decision to side with Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” adding, “It is a sad ending to a sad story.” Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, penned a scathing letter to senators ahead of RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings, in which she called him a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.”
When asked by Elizabeth Vargas whether she’s angry with the Kennedys for not supporting her husband, Hines answered simply: “Sometimes, yes.”
However, Hines acknowledged that, in a large family with such history and tragedy intertwined in their public image, there’s room for nuance. “It’s a big family,” she said. “There are a lot of Kennedys, and they all have different relationships with each other and different relationships with Bobby.”
“It was a difficult time,” she said of Bobby joining Trump’s Cabinet. “I know that some of [the Kennedys] were part of the Biden administration or, you know, working somehow in that administration. I understood that. But I was really, really disappointed to see a few of them really speak so disrespectfully about Bobby. I’ve really loved them through the years, and still love them, but I can’t help but to think of some of them differently, because I didn’t respect what they did.”
As for whether or not she’s felt estranged from the Hollywood community for her husband’s politics, Hines said she’s seen a range of reactions.
“There are a lot of people who have been great to me who reach out to me,” she said. “They range from, ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy, are you okay?’ To, ‘I love what your husband’s doing and I’m behind you guys a hundred percent.’ And there are people in the entertainment industry that do feel like that.” Despite headlines about her estrangement from Curb co-star Larry David, Hines said that for many of her peers in the entertainment world, it’s a “subject-by-subject” conversation.
“I think that’s a pretty healthy attitude to have about everything,” she explained. “I think it’s better to take a step back and say, ‘Well, let’s look at what’s on the table’… So there’s a range, you know. I do have a few friends that I know are just very upset by even Bobby being in the administration. It’s very upsetting to them, and I understand that, I respect it. I haven’t had any, I haven’t had any falling outs. I haven’t had a moment of somebody storming out the door.”
The absolute audacity of this woman. Not only to break the Kennedy omerta by publicly insulting her in-laws, but doing so over Bobby’s defection into a Nazi cult. This isn’t “Ted Kennedy working on legislation with John McCain,” meaning, this is not a Republican and Democrat finding common ground and working towards the greater good, with give and take on both sides. This is RFK Jr. giving the Kennedy “aura” to a fascist authoritarian AND he’s literally killing people with his bonkers pseudoscience and anti-vaxx bullsh-t. I’m proud of the other Kennedys for publicly calling him out, and I think what Caroline did was magnificent (no surprise, Caroline IS magnificent). Cheryl is pathetic – she’s doing everything she can to cling to this horrible man, just so she can be a “Kennedy wife.”
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
