I would imagine that most of you have heard about the Olivia Nuzzi account of her relationship with RFK Jr and her former fiance Ryan Lizza’s tell all about the same question. I’m not sure why we should care about all these creepy people but it’s a titillating sorry and everybody likes on of those on some level.

I read the excerpt of her book in Vanity Fair and frankly, it’s incomprehensible. She clearly had a very talented editor at New York magazine because this is just .. no. I also read the first (free) installment of Lizza’s tell all and it was an explicit tabloid account of it from his perspective. Yuck. (I didn’t read the second installment because I didn’t want to pay for it but from what I can gather, RFK Jr. is one sick, misogynist monster and Lizza is a nasty little creep as well.)

This question posed by Inae Oh of Mother Jones is the big question to me and it’s one I’ve asked myself my whole life. Him? Why?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name may not appear in Olivia Nuzzi’s forthcoming memoir, American Canto. But the 71-year-old secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is at the burning core of Nuzzi’s return to the public eye this month, after her firing last year over a “digital affair” with the then-presidential candidate while she covered the 2024 campaign for New York magazine. The unfolding drama, following the publication of a lavishly photographed New York Times profile and Vanity Fair excerpt, is expected to grow more fraught when a reported collection of “sexually charged” text messages appears next month.

American Canto, as it appears in Vanity Fair, is profoundly unreadable, packed with prose that relies on a reader’s tolerance to witness humiliating forms of self-sabotage. Nuzzi describes outrunning a California wildfire while, for some reason, obsessing over Kennedy as she tries to escape. (She also appears to invite readers into conflating the fire she is fleeing with the devastating Palisades wildfire that destroyed the region two months later.) As much as American Canto reads like a diaristic slot machine of half-thoughts and self-absorbed efforts at profundity, it is also startlingly effective in its depiction of a woman deteriorating in the throes of potent desire. Here is how Nuzzi describes “the Politician.”

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.”

Again, him?

I ask myself that question about Trump as well but at least he had the promise of real money. What in the world do all these women see in Bobby Jr? He supposedly had so many affairs that his then-wife ended up killing herself.

Why?