I love Kennedy family lore as much as the next red-blooded American (I even read a whole book about Rosemary!), but when it comes to the personal and political foibles of former 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I have but one word to offer: enough. It’s been—to put it mildly—a big few days for Kennedy, whose sext-based extramarital relationship (characterized as demure by sources) with New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi was revealed last week. And while a 70-year-old man bragging about a 31-year-old woman sending him nudes is always incredibly cool and classy, I just can’t summon the energy to take even an ounce of schadenfreude-tinged pleasure in this particularly salacious bit of media-meets-politics nonsense.
Bizarrely enough, the Olivia Nuzzi scandal is actually perhaps the most normal bit of gossip to emerge about Kennedy since he began his campaign in 2023. This past May, Kennedy attributed the memory loss and brain fog he experienced in 2010 to “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died” (yes, really), and three months later, he confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park after picking it up from the side of the road upstate with the intent to consume its meat. The same month, Kennedy’s daughter Kick recounted a story about her father beheading a dead whale and strapping it to the top of his minivan for a five-hour drive. (And then, of course, there are the even more unseemly parts of his story, from sexual-assault allegations to the fact that Kennedy pledged to not “take sides on 9/11.”)
Ever since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I, like many of us, have become pretty good at staying dialed in enough to the political discourse to be generally aware of what’s going on but without absorbing too many details about horrible, powerful men that would potentially make me go insane if I thought about them too hard. However, Kennedy is jeopardizing that delicate balance with his endless onslaught of bad and bizarre press, and I, for one, would like to return to a time when I knew absolutely nothing about him except for being vaguely aware that he was married to Cheryl Hines. When it comes to RFK Jr., maybe ignorance really is bliss.