Olivia Nuzzi says Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t have a ‘brain worm’ after all

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi, who upended her career for having an alleged ‘digital’ affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., blew up the weirdest piece of campaign lore about the current Health and Human Services Secretary in her new book.

He may not have had a brain worm after all.

On Monday morning, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Nuzzi’s forthcoming book, American Canto, which arrives on bookshelves on December 2.

Kennedy is never mentioned by name, instead Nuzzi refers to him throughout the book as the ‘Politician,’ but it’s clearly RFK Jr. as she remarks that she did ‘not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny.’

‘I loved his brain,’ she wrote. ‘I hated the idea of an intruder therein.’

In May 2024, as Kennedy plugged along with his independent presidential campaign, the New York Times revealed that the candidate had testified as part of his 2012 divorce proceedings that one of his doctors believed he had a dead parasite in his head.

Kennedy’s ‘brain worm’ became an instant cultural hit, birthing a Saturday Night Live sketch and playing into the greater narrative of RFK Jr.’s transformation from revered liberal environmental lawyer to politically nebulous anti-vaxxer.

Nuzzi, now Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor, said she was aware that people thought RFK Jr. to be a ‘madman.’

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi writes about her alleged relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in her forthcoming book, American Canto. In the book she knocks down one of the weirdest pieces of campaign lore about Kennedy, that he had a ‘brain worm’ die in his head

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is captured at an event on the National Mall in August. Nuzzi says Kennedy asked her to take a ‘bullet’ for him amid the fallout from their scandal

‘He was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad,’ she wrote. ‘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,’ she wrote.

Last week, The New York Times published the first details on Nuzzi’s alleged non-physical tryst with RFK Jr. – including that he called her ‘Livvy,’ wrote her poems and wanted her to have his child, she claimed.

He also refers to her as ‘baby.’

‘Baby don’t worry,’ he tells her in the book. ‘It’s not a worm.’

She goes on to explain: ‘A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all.’

‘He sighed,’ she continued. ‘It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.’

Nuzzi did have to worry about how word of their relationship would ricochet around the political world.

Olivia Nuzzi moved to Malibu after the scandal of her alleged relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rocked Washington, D.C., where she had lived with her fiancé, Ryan Lizza

In September 2024 the news broke that Nuzzi, New York Magazine’s first-ever Washington correspondent, had been put on leave over an inappropriate relationship.

She said in a statement that ‘communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal.’

Nuzzi had been engaged to another prominent political reporter, Ryan Lizza, while Kennedy had a wife of 10 years, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines.

In the book, she writes that Kennedy would always tell her, ‘I would take a bullet for you.’

‘He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that,’ she wrote.

‘From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment,’ she said.

The scandal surrounding their relationship happened after Kennedy had dropped out of the presidential race, and endorsed President Donald Trump, but before he had cemented his position in Trump’s Cabinet.

‘Shots rang out,’ she wrote. ‘The story of the relationship had broken, the bullet metaphorical. My phone rang again. “I need you to take a bullet for me,” the Politician said. “Please.”‘

She did.

Nuzzi made one comment about the alleged relationship with Kennedy and went into self-imposed exile in Malibu, California, interspersing details about living through the wildfires as she recounts the aftermath of the scandal.

‘You cannot outrun your life on fire,’ she notes in the book.

Meanwhile ‘the Politician offers a united front and a rewritten history.’

A week after the election, Trump offered Kennedy the HHS gig.

Nuzzi noted how ‘the man I trusted most, the Politician, had walked by the scene whistling, and when he saw me there, a mob on the horizon moving closer, he reached out to me, not to lift me to my feet but to pin me down, to drive the teeth of the trap deeper into my flesh, to hike my skirt higher, to wave the mob over to look, to invite the country to lay its hands on me.’

‘It does not matter how it felt. I knew this then and know it now,’ she wrote. ‘After all, I was asking for it.’