An affair, a blog, rude poetry – yes, it’s another RFK Jr scandal
Does the libido of the US health secretary know no bounds? Given the intimate verse it’s claimed he wrote to a lover less than half his age, it certainly seems so.
It must be noted that when Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the confessional and scandal-prone health secretary of the United States, is the only one involved who is keeping a dignified silence, you have quite a story on your hands.
It must also be noted that, this time, the torrid details Kennedy is remaining dignified and silent about are piling up in dumpster proportions. The telenovela of sex, lies and competitive betrayal that has been amusing and appalling America’s political class over the past week has just had its latest dump (instalment gives it too much literary flair).
It reveals sex “poetry” allegedly written by Kennedy, 71, who remains married, and sent to Olivia Nuzzi, a political journalist aged 32. The time was alleged as during the aftermath of the 2023 presidential election campaign. While Nuzzi may have betrayed some secrets about Kennedy, she in turn has been betrayed, by her fiance at the time. This was another political journalist, Ryan Lizza, who has arrived late to this story but with the most inflammatory claims, like a firefighter hosing petrol on the inferno.
If you have followed the twists so far, congratulations, and take a deep breath. Lizza seems to have released Kennedy’s sex poetry in retaliation for Nuzzi falling in love with Kennedy. Confused? You will be.
Kennedy’s alleged love sonnet opens with, according to Lizza, the deathless line “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest”. This compensates with directness whatever it lacks in Keatsean delicacy. “Drink from me Love,” it continues.
Not everyone would want to drink from Kennedy. He is as wizened as a raisin after self-promoting his belief in sunlight as medicine. He is also a former heroin addict. He has talked of the parasitical worm lodged in his brain and he remains resolutely anti-vaccine. That is not a universal yum-yum beverage of choice.
But there is no time to be revolted, because the poet has not finished and this time he challenges our stomachs in a whole new way. This is the imagery of suffocation and control of female sexual partners that is borrowed from the more violent recesses of internet pornography.
“I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth,” it continues. “I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Don’t spill a drop.’ I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you.”
And there is little time even to dwell on that useful public service announcement against forced oral sex from the man in charge of America’s wellbeing. We learn next that this “poetry” introduces the idea of an “f-word” named after a sex act niche enough to have some people (OK, me) scurrying for help from the internet, where the top result is within Kennedy’s professional remit, the United States National Institutes of Health. Here the word is described as meaning “a sexual practice, fairly common among men who have sex with other men”.
Truly, this is a story so salacious it pays to imagine it as a soap opera narrated by three of its four central characters. Or, in British terms, it is the poetry from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and three quarters crossed with a porno and somehow also about a serving cabinet secretary. Kennedy remains non-speaking for now. He has denied Nuzzi’s claims of a sexual or romantic relationship, saying they met only once for an interview.
First there is Cheryl Hines, 60, Kennedy’s third and present wife, and appropriately, a sitcom actress in shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hines uses the medium of her memoir, Unscripted, published this month, to try to defuse this dirty bomb of revelations from Nuzzi. Hines’s tone is syrupy obfuscation, although she uses an interesting handcuffing metaphor for her marriage. This scandal has, she writes, only served to “tighten our ties that bind”.
Next is Nuzzi, who has written her own memoir, American Canto, to be published next month. An excerpt has been published by Nuzzi’s new employer, Vanity Fair. Her tone has been described as Joan Didion pastiche, but if you were a family member of Nuzzi’s, it might give you cause for concern.
Here, for instance, is a sample passage, describing the politician she loved, she says, brain worm, “range of kinks” and all.
“He was,” Nuzzi writes in American Canto, “the giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. 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 third character is Lizza, a political journalist in his fifties who lived with and was engaged to Nuzzi. He has been slow off the blocks to write a book, but to catch up with Hines and Nuzzi he is using probably the best vehicle for this material, which is the paid-subscription model of Dickens, although the content would have dearly departed journalists such as Dickens and Didion rolling like brain worms in their graves. Lizza’s latest essay on Substack dropped at the weekend.
Unlike Nuzzi he does not waste time on extended metaphors about the “gibbous moon”. No, Lizza has an instinct for juicy storytelling, in the model of every man propped at every bar at midnight railing about the lurid failings of his ex, including Nuzzi’s private notes he read after they “fell out” of her bag.
With Hines’s book fading from the headlines what this now amounts to is Nuzzi v Lizza, both long on “zzzzs” and yet competing for attention. Two exes and hacks flapping open their dirty trench coats at us in a way that is unprofessional, unappetising, unedifying, yet undeniably startling.
For example, Lizza mocks Nuzzi’s portentous book title, American Canto, by titling Kennedy’s alleged sex poetry “American Canyon”, a title which in context reads like an ungentlemanly description of his former love. Each of Lizza’s dispatches is treated as an exercise in suspense. In the first one he leads the reader to imagine he is describing Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy.
However, all along it’s a bait and switch. Instead, he drops the claim that Nuzzi had previously had a relationship with another politician she profiled in the course of her work, Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina. Nuzzi interviewed Sanford for New York magazine in 2019 when he was making a bid for the presidency. Nuzzi’s lawyer, Ari Wilkenfeld, said in a statement that “in American Canto Ms Nuzzi discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering”.
Is it possible to waft away all the smoke from this stink bomb and see what actually happened between Nuzzi and Kennedy? They agree they met in Los Angeles in 2023. She interviewed Kennedy during a hike in the course of writing a profile for New York magazine.
Kennedy denies anything further. But even Nuzzi, once you squint through her haze of allusions to wildfires in American Canto, does not allege a relationship in the conventional sense. In the book she writes that Kennedy told her he loved her as part of a close and lengthy correspondence. In interviews Nuzzi has been clear, stating: “We were not sleeping together.”
Lizza corroborates this claim. He wrote in his latest instalment that Nuzzi had longstanding fantasies about “what it would be like when her secret relationship with a notorious politician finally became public”. He writes that even when he pressed her about Kennedy, Nuzzi maintained: “I’m telling you the truth that I have not had a physical relationship with him. I’ve never had sex with him. I’ve never touched him.”
Lizza writes that Nuzzi had a “near total obsession” with Kennedy and that he finds her claim that it was not a physical relationship “improbable”. Lizza then contrives his trademark cliffhanger, signing off by saying that Nuzzi was scared. “’If anyone ever finds out,’ Olivia told me, ‘I’m afraid Bobby will kill me.’”
Cue dramatic music and end credits. This story starts as one kind of dirty (fun! filth!) and ends as the horrible kind of dirty, a grubbiness staining all involved. When the screen turns to black, only then do we remember that these are not actors. They are real people, existing out there in the dark.
The Times
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout