The reviews for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s poetry are in: the Health Secretary’s attempt at a sensual sonnet reads more like an adolescent’s porn fantasy.
Bestselling author Kurt Andersen dissected the 71-year-old’s poem for his alleged digital lover, 32-year-old journalist Olivia Nuzzi, which generated buzz—and nausea—after it was publicly unveiled by her scorned ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza in a nail-biting exposé.
The poem allegedly reads: “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest. Drink from me Love. I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Dont spill a drop.’ I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”
Andersen, an award-winning writer, wasn’t too impressed with Kennedy’s crack at literature.
“This poem, first of all, [is] reckless because he’s married and he’s running for president, and like, dude, really?” he told The Daily Beast Podcast host Joanna Coles. “It’s so cringe in a particularly, to me, adolescent way. This 70-year-old man—or whatever he was at the time—writing this thing to this woman who’s almost 40 years younger than him.”
“It’s just, oh my God, you’re beyond just the embarrassment of the revelations about one’s sex life—or non-sex life or virtual sex life or post-modern adultery or whatever it is,” he went on. “The sheer awfulness of the poetry in its adolescent way is the thing that struck me. But then, you know, I pretend to be a writer and I guess Bobby doesn’t. He’s just a romantic. He’s just a Byronic figure.”
Andersen was particularly put off by the “death-dealing descriptions” in Kennedy’s sonnet, which he said fell just “short of, ‘And then I will strike you and punch you’ or something.”
“An adolescent who, unlike people 50 years ago, has seen a lot of porn, might be inspired to have this violent, porn-like fantasy encounter with this woman,” he said. “It was hideous.”
Though Lizza provided scant specifics about Kennedy’s love letter to his then-fiancée, he said he discovered the poem during last year’s presidential campaign.
Nuzzi had been covering the independent candidate for New York magazine, which parted ways with her after Status News revealed that she had been exchanging steamy text messages with Kennedy.
The relationship was purely digital, Nuzzi said at the time. Kennedy claimed that he had only ever met the journalist once, but the Daily Beast, which employed Nuzzi from 2014 to 2017, later reported that he bragged about having her intimate photos.
Kennedy was—and still is—married to actress Cheryl Hines, 60, who is reportedly irate about Nuzzi’s bombshell account of their affair in her upcoming book. Lizza has also blasted Nuzzi’s new novel, American Canto, as “a campaign of misinformation about what really happened.”
“I wish I hadn’t been put in this position, that I didn’t have to write about any of this, that I didn’t have to subject myself or my loved ones to embarrassment and further loss of privacy,” Lizza wrote. “Unfortunately, I’m the only other person who knows everything. And while sometimes I wish I could unknow it, the least I can do is share the parts I believe you should know, too.”
Vanity Fair, meanwhile, said it was reviewing Nuzzi’s appointment as West Coast editor in the messy aftermath of Lizza’s revelations.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Kennedy’s office for comment.
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