Olivia Nuzzi’s tell-all book is finally here — and it paints a picture of obsessive love, drugs and bad poetry from the “worm”-filled brain of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is only called “The Politician.”
The 71-year-old Secretary of Health and Human Services allegedly wept as he told Nuzzi, “I wish I could just be with you” — and said she made him feel as free as the moment he was thrown from his runaway horse as a child.
Nuzzi, 32, also claims in “American Canto” that the Kennedy scion wanted to impregnate her.
“I would take a bullet for you,” Kennedy allegedly told the former New York Magazine journalist — although that changed when their affair became public and he asked her to take a metaphorical bullet for him, she writes.
“If it’s just sex, I can survive it,” he allegedly said, seemingly asking her not to reveal their relationship as anything more complex. (Nuzzi has always maintained the affair was not consummated.)
She also details the abrupt ending of their clandestine romance and how Kennedy sent her an “acid note” — even threatening to call the FBI on her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, who allegedly leaked news of their affair. According to the book, it was Nuzzi who ended up speaking to the FBI, fearing that she had been hacked.
Nuzzi first met Kennedy, who is married to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress Cheryl Hines, in 2023 when she interviewed him for New York Magazine during his failed presidential bid. She was then engaged to Lizza, a former Politico journalist.
The Post has reached out to reps for Kennedy and Hines.
The glamorous blonde writes how Kennedy, who famously struggled with substance abuse in the past and has long spoken of being sober, would smoke the hallucinogenic drug DMT in secret while his wife was out of the house.
The book describes DMT as sending users “into the stratosphere of ego death and back to earth in fifteen minutes.” When she asked what it was like, Kennedy replied, “it’s just your classic psychedelic experience.”
Nuzzi also writes about hearing The Politician did another drug “that sometimes interfered with his ability to perform the work of campaigning for office. When I raised the subject, he denied it.”
Kennedy, she says, loved to show her photos from his younger years — and regale her with stories about his past.
He told her about one summer when he lived with musicians Keith Richards and John Phillips — and The Mamas and The Papas singer purchased a pharmacy so they would have access to amphetamines.
Nuzzi claims that as their love intensified, Kennedy told her, “I need everything from you, Livvy.
“He always said that. Mostly, it seemed sweet, earnest. ‘Everything is yours,’ I said. I always said that. He told me that he wanted to have his baby. This seemed earnest too,” she writes.
Nuzzi writes that they had such an intimate relationship that, during their video calls he was often shirtless and she could see signs of his life — like the toiletry bag filled with so many prescription drugs it could barely close.
When, on his 10th wedding anniversary, Nuzzi spotted a framed photo of Hines and Kennedy in the background of their call, “he flipped it over, out of sight,” she writes.
In one saccharine moment, Kennedy recounts his childhood horse riding accident.
“He closed his eyes. They are a startling kind of blue. Not blue as the seas but blue as the flame. When he opened them again, he was crying. [Being thrown by a horse] was the most free he had ever felt, he said, and he searched for that feeling, for that freedom for his whole life. He felt that freedom, he said, with me.”
She, in turn, was upset by stories about a worm infiltrating his brain.
“I hated the idea of an intruder therein,” Nuzzi writes. Although he said a doctor had told him it was not a worm, it was too late to stop what had already become “screwy legend.”
As for another screwy story about Kennedy — that he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park in 2014 — Nuzzi admits that she convinced him to “get ahead” of the story after a journalist found out about it in 2024. “It will help me with rednecks and hurt me with liberals,” Kennedy ultimately decided.
There was also “explicit” poetry.
“I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love,” Nuzzi says Kennedy wrote — adding that he also “described, along with other feralities, his plans for my ‘womb.’”
But things came to a head, the journalist writes, when her mentor — podcaster Kara Swisher confirmed to The Post that it was she — found out about the Kennedy affair and went to Nuzzi’s bosses at New York Magazine.
She admits that she lied when confronted and claims that her boss suggested she pen a “tell-all” for the magazine and “write your way out of this.” (Through a New York Magazine spokesperson, editor-in-chief David Haskell declined comment.)
When the story broke in September 2024, Kennedy told her Hines was “hysterical” in Milan and had refused to be seen with him in public until after the election, while his alliance with Trump was “fragile.”
“I need you to take a bullet for me,” he said. “If it’s just sex, I can survive it.” If it was anything more he could not.”
Kennedy read Nuzzi a message he had sent to Lizza, accusing him of violating their privacy and stalking Nuzzi.
He threatened to go to the FBI, but “he then referred to me as a stalker,” Nuzzi said incredulously. “I’m sorry, I had to exculpate myself,” he told her.
After leaving her job, Nuzzi moved to Malibu, CA. and was hired as West Coast Editor at Vanity Fair, although that role may now be up in the air.
Despite losing her fiancé, her home and her job, the author admits she still kept tabs on Kennedy’s confirmation hearing and was stunned — after everything — to get message via his bodyguard
“Just, well, he’s sorry,” the Bodyguard said. “I told him to let me handle this. I need you to read between the lines.”
Perhaps somewhat chastened, Nuzzi writes: “A politician’s greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.”
