Back in the spotlight after her yearlong self-imposed exile when it was revealed she’d engaged in a secret romance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Olivia Nuzzi claims in her new memoir that the HHS secretary wanted her to have his baby and that he uses psychedelic drugs, among other jaw-dropping details.
Nuzzi, who recently joined Vanity Fair as its West Coast correspondent, dished on American Canto – her book that is set to be released next month – and her “digital affair” with Kennedy in a series of interviews with The New York Times.
Her relationship with Kennedy, which began during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign when the current Trump official was running as an independent, ultimately derailed her career. She was fired from her job at New York magazine, and her engagement with journalist Ryan Lizza publicly crumbled.
Nuzzi eventually filed a petition for a protective order against her ex-fiancé and accused him of harassment and blackmail related to leaking details about her extramarital relationship with Kennedy to other media outlets. In the end, she would largely disappear from the public eye for the next year, during which she spent time in Malibu writing her book.
In American Canto, she never actually explicitly names Kennedy, though readers are clearly aware of who she is referring to throughout.
Saying that she loved the 71-year-old anti-vaccine activist, Nuzzi notes that she only told Kennedy – who is married to actress Cheryl Hines – “I love you” after he said it first. She also reveals that Kennedy gave her the nickname “Livvy” and wrote poems to her. He went so far as to tell her he’d take a bullet for her – and even expressed his desire for her to have his child.
“She writes that the first few times Kennedy said he loved her, she did not say it back,” the New York Times noted. “Yet she knew she felt the same. ‘I love him, I thought. Oh no. I love him so much.’ They spoke often and were intimate enough for her to see him flossing his teeth, his dopp kit overflowing with prescriptions.”
She also insisted that while Kennedy had claimed to be “sober” for decades, he confided in her that he was taking psychedelics and smoked the powerful drug dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. She, in turn, let him know she took Adderall and “liked uppers.”
In the end, with Kennedy looking to join forces with Trump after his presidential campaign imploded, she said that Kennedy’s promise to “take a bullet” turned into her having to do that for him.
Once news of their relationship broke in September of last year, she told Kennedy she would do whatever he needed. Kennedy, meanwhile, said: “If it’s just sex, I can survive it.” She told the Times that she has not spoken to Kennedy in a year.
At the time the relationship came to light, Kennedy attempted to shrug it off, insisting he’d only ever met Nuzzi once for a “hit piece” she wrote about him for New York magazine.
Meanwhile, the Times pointed out that Nuzzi’s book is written in such a way that it “allows her to construct a world where everyone is a sketch and proof is beside the point.” She also asserts in the memoir that she understands people will disagree with her version of history, and that she’s not trying to prove anything.
Still, when asked whether she still had her text messages with Kennedy, she replied: “I don’t have anything to say about that.”
During one interview with the Times, Nuzzi “gave up the pretense of trying to explain the unexplainable” and joked about why she suddenly fell in love with the current head of Trump’s health department.
“Maybe it was the vaccines,” she quipped while sitting under a pine tree.
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