Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a complex man of many colors and contradictions—a man who simultaneously says he cares deeply about the environment but who also enjoys working for Donald Trump (a known fossil fuel lover). He’s a man who likes to present himself as an affable everyman who also apparently loves storing roadkill in his freezer and decapitating beached whales. He’s also a man who happens to have been married for quite a long time but who, according to a recent tell-all book from a disgraced journalist, engaged in a secretive tryst, during which he laid bare his innermost self.
Yes, by now you’ve surely heard the drama surrounding Olivia Nuzzi, the former New York magazine politics reporter, and Kennedy, who are alleged to have had a chaste affair while Nuzzi was covering his political campaign last year. Nuzzi has managed to spin what—for most other journalists—would have been a humiliating career death knell into a book deal. Her new tome, American Canto, is partially about her relationship with Kennedy. While it’s not out yet (it’s coming out next month), it has recently been previewed by select publications. The book appears to divulge admissions Kennedy made to her in private, including that he had admitted to using brain-warping drugs and also claimed that the dead worm in his brain was not actually a worm.
The drug claim comes from the New York Times, which recently profiled Nuzzi, as well as her book. In the profile, Nuzzi claims that while they were in contact, Kennedy admitted to doing DMT, a psychedelic drug that can produce intense auditory and visual hallucinations. The paper notes:
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.”
The DMT claim is somewhat fitting and perhaps not too surprising for Kennedy, given his interest in fringe health treatments. At the same time, it also makes a certain amount of political sense. Bizarre as it may seem, the call to legalize psychedelics has been coming from the political right in recent years. Conservatives want to get weird with legalizing mind-melding drugs, and RFK has been seen as a natural candidate for advancing that mission. This summer, it was reported that Kennedy was “ramping up government-run clinical studies” on psychedelics.
“These are people who badly need some kind of therapy; nothing else is working for them,” Kennedy said at a House hearing in June. “This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting. And we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.”
At another point in American Canto, part of which was recently published by Vanity Fair (Nuzzi is now an editor there), Kennedy is alleged to have told her that he did not actually have a worm in his brain. The worm in question was originally reported by the New York Times last year. Journalists discovered that, in 2010, a parasite had eaten part of RFK’s grey matter and subsequently died. According to Nuzzi’s book, however, Kennedy told her this was not the case. The passage, which has induced chortles throughout the internet, reads:
I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. 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. “Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a worm.” A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. 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.
So, yeah, wow. Truly, some poetic words for the worm. Nuzzi has maintained that she and Kennedy never physically consummated the relationship, and that the dalliance was solely over the phone and the internet (it has been referred to as a “sexting affair”). Kennedy, meanwhile, has denied any relationship with her. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, reportedly spoke out about Nuzzi’s claims that the two were in love and that Kennedy wanted her to have his child, telling sources that Nuzzi was a “fucking liar.”
Over the past few days, Nuzzi has also been accused of having an affair with another interview subject, Mark Sanford, a politician from South Carolina. That claim comes from her former fiancé/former Politico reporter Ryan Lizza, who wrote about it for his independent outlet Telos. Gizmodo reached out to the HHS for comment. We also reached out to Condé Nast, the parent company of Vanity Fair.
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