My Emotional Affair with RFK Jr.

I also briefly fell in love with America's favorite antivaxxer.

“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.”

— Olivia Nuzzi on her relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The internet has been aflame with recently published excerpts from Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir American Canto, which scan like they were written by a high schooler who just read Pride & Prejudice for the first time. In the book, she details her psychosexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he was a presidential candidate, and she was a political reporter for New York magazine.

While others have laughed and joked at Nuzzi’s writing style and bizarrely terrible judgment, her account rang all too familiar to me. In fact, she’s helped me realize that it’s time for me to admit something: I also had an emotional affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Here is my account.

It began in Davenport, Iowa. I was covering his presidential campaign as part of Chortle’s nationally recognized exclusive interview series.

We met at a diner. The kind with vinyl booths and waitresses who called everyone “hon.” He arrived twenty minutes late, smelling of what I can only describe as falconry.

My heart immediately quickened.

We ordered coffee. He asked for raw milk, then spent fifteen minutes explaining how pasteurization was originally a Freemason conspiracy. The way his hands moved as he described bacterial colonies made my breath catch—tender, heartfelt, manic.

“Tell me about your campaign,” I managed.

But he wanted to talk about other things. Golf. Tanning beds. The family of opossums living in his Suburban. Whether I’d ever taken Tylenol.

The waitress refilled our coffee. Hours passed. To my mixed delight and dismay, we barely discussed his plans to fire thousands of CDC scientists. Outside, the Iowa night pressed against the windows.

“Come back to my hotel,” he gargled. It wasn’t a question. “The Ramada Inn. They don’t have suites, but I have a room near the elevator.”

I knew I should press him on his earlier comment that mercury is “probably fine to drink, actually.” But when he reached across the table and brushed my hand—his palm rough with a fungus he called “completely unique”—I understood that this was no longer about journalism.

In his room, he dimmed the lights. Not for ambiance, he explained, but because the bulbs were emitting a “poisonous frequency.”

He moved closer. His eyes were blue. Watery blue. The blue of someone who should probably see an ophthalmologist, but doesn’t trust Big Eye Doctor.

I was frozen. Torn between his hypnotic gaze, my journalistic duties, and my brain stem’s frantic flight-or-flight response to a man it rightly interpreted as an evolutionary threat to humanity.

He pressed against me. I could feel his ribcage through his shirt, evidence that he wasn’t lying about the success of his 100% elk meat diet. But just as things were about to intensify, he pulled away.

“I can’t,” he rasped, running his hands through his hair and coming away with mysterious black flecks.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s complicated.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “I’ve been retaining my seed. Haven’t released since 1987. It’s made me sharper. More vital. If I break the streak now...” He trailed off, staring at the wall with those weepy blue eyes.

“I understand,” I whispered, even though I didn’t.

He looked at me. “But we’ll always have this. The connection. The electricity between us.”

Just like that, it was over.

Others thought Kennedy 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 and that he didn’t know what the word insatiable meant. I loved all the things he didn’t know, but thought he did. I loved that he was a clear and present danger to society. I loved that he once swallowed a pigeon whole.

I later learned he’d moved on to another journalist. More successful, blonder. But I understood. I understood that he desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired polio for some reason.

And as for me? How did things turn out? Well, let’s just say that fungal infection isn’t so unique anymore.

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