Jerry Oppenheimer is the author of two biographies of the Kennedys: The Other Mrs. Kennedy, Ethel Skakel Kennedy: An American Drama of Power, Privilege, and Politics, and RFK JR. and The Dark Side of the Dream.
Close friends of Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines are expecting her to file for divorce from RFK Jr. in the wake of his bizarre sexting relationship with much younger journalist Olivia Nuzzi, DailyMail.com has learned.
In an exclusive interview, a Hines confidante said the television star, 59, was ‘blindsided’ by the scandal and had believed her husband’s philandering was a thing of the past.
‘Cheryl found ten years of marriage with Bobby to be ‘spicier and a lot of laughs’,’ the source, a longtime friend, told DailyMail.com.
‘She adored being a member of America’s royal family, and having the famous Kennedy name attached to hers, but now she’s thoroughly embarrassed and furious about his adulterous actions and they believe she wants out.’
The insider added: ‘Cheryl was always very aware that Bobby had a long history of womanizing. She herself had become very publicly involved with him when he was still married to his second wife, so his playing around wasn’t anything new to her.
‘However, she firmly believed Bobby, in his seventh decade and with political aspirations, finally had his sex demons under control, and appeared settled down in their seemingly bucolic southern California domestic life.
‘But she now feels totally blindsided and humiliated. His affair with that woman, Olivia Nuzzi, has reeked-havoc on their marriage.
‘If Cheryl has her way, Bobby be a three could be a three-time loser in marriage. She’s considering divorce because Bobby’s out-of-the-blue sexting affair with a woman four decades his junior has definitely curbed her enthusiasm about their tumultuous union.’
Late last month, Nuzzi, 31, the Washington, D.C. star political correspondent for New York magazine, acknowledged having a sexting relationship with Kennedy, 70, while covering his campaign.
Kennedy, who suspended his independent bid for president and threw his support behind Donald Trump in August, claimed the two had only met once when Nuzzi interviewed him for the magazine.
Friends told Page Six that Nuzzi disclosed they had enjoyed steamy FaceTime sessions, and the journalist was impressed by 70-year-old RFK Jr.’s ‘sexual stamina’.
Nuzzi has since stepped down from her job.
Hines would spark divorce rumors days later when she was snapped without her large diamond ring while leaving a Gucci-hosted afterparty during Milan Fashion Week on September 20.
Photos showed the actress was only wearing her wedding band and had ditched the second bigger ring that she had been pictured wearing a couple days earlier at the Emmy Awards.
She was recently seen again at a Paris Fashion Week event where she deliberately flashed the wedding band on her finger to photographers.
Meanwhile, a close RFK Jr. ally says he was shocked when the story about the Kennedy-Olivia Nuzzi relationship became public earlier this month because Bobby was always boasting that he’d long ago quelled his addictions – drug and sex.
‘But, clearly, he’s the same old Bobby, who I’ve known since college, in the days when his dorm room had girls lined up to have sex with him,’ the insider said.
‘Bobby’s like a sexual Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – he’s been that way for decades — and when the opportunity arises with a woman – in his case, just about any woman — the monster side surfaces and controls his brain. I suspect that’s what happened once again when he got entangled in his online sexual relationship with Olivia.’
As a journalist and bestselling author who has covered the Kennedys for years, two of my thirteen books have been about the legendary family, and the most recent is the only biography of the troubled namesake of assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy, entitled, ‘RFK JR. and the Dark Side of the Dream.’
As part of my several years of research for the book, I probed Kennedy’s life – from his troubled teen years when his father was murdered and his mother, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, all but abandoned him, turning over his upbringing to a longtime gay family friend, to his years of drug addiction, including, but not limited to heroin, which he would score in Harlem.
‘I had impulses,’ he said at the time, ‘then it turned into something else.’
I looked into his three marriages. In two of them, his obsessive womanizing would play a role in the unions’ failing. And now it appears his third marriage, with Hines, is nearing an end because of the sexting affair.
Kennedy wed Hines in the storied Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, on August 2, 2014 – a little over two years after his second wife, Mary Richardson, mother of four of his six children, had hanged herself at age 52 in an old garage on Kennedy’s estate in bucolic and wealthy Mount Kisco, New York.
Before her tragic suicide Bobby had been interviewed for a story in Oprah Winfrey’s popular O Magazine, and he blatantly declared: ‘I think Mary would call me a pretty good husband.’
But that was far from true, given his womanizing, Mary Richardson was a very troubled and cuckolded spouse, according to numerous close sources I interviewed.
Confidantes of Mary told me that she became aware of his womanizing — a lot of affairs, some of them long-term – ‘and was furious’ – just like his next wife, Hines, is said to be years later.
The future presidential hopeful’s come-ons to females had become legend.
When he was in Alcoholics Anonymous, he made a ‘sexual advance’ on another member.
At dinner parties, he was known to touch the legs and fondle female dinner guests seated on either side of him.
As one credible source revealed: ‘He would be at the dinner table and his hands would go all up their legs or skirts. The Kennedy aura, however, kept them from saying, ‘You’re an a**hole.’
On at least one occasion, Kennedy’s ‘inappropriate behavior,’ included strutting around with a towel wrapped around his waist, then dropped it, exposing his genitals to an innocent female.
At a private and posh gym and health club in Westchester County, New York, Bobby began building up his body , using an Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe kind of guy’ as his trainer, and demanding the maximum amount of weight – eight hundred to a thousand pounds placed on the leg press machine.
Then married to Mary Richardson, he was building his body to attract other women, and was successful, including with a fit blonde in her thirties – a married mother, according a longtime club source.
Bobby and the woman had a more intimate relationship outside the gym – they would ‘rendezvous’ in the club’s parking lot, the insider claimed.
Bobby infuriated his second wife, Mary, when he began holding meetings of members from a local branch of Tennessee-headquartered Sexaholics Anonymous, at the Kennedy family home in Mount Kisko.
But Mary ended the practice fearing it was dangerous having strange men with sexual addiction problems around the house, especially when the Kennedy children were there.
Mary once confided to a friend that Bobby had tried to lure her into a threesome, but she was sickened by the invitation and refused.
At one point, Bobby’s cell phone directory contained the first names and telephone numbers of more than forty women located all over the U.S., Canada, and even Paris.
Moreover, he was said to have used the name ‘Robert Strong’ as an alias when he travelled, apparently to hide his famous Kennedy name from women he met on the road.
While Mary Richardson was very much aware of Bobby’s womanizing, she was shocked when she learned from a confidante that her husband was having an affair with Cheryl Hines.
Mary claimed she had introduced Hines to Bobby at a charity event, although Bobby and Hines asserted their friend, the comedian Larry David, had made the introduction.
David once made a prediction to Bobby after he tied the knot with Cheryl. He told him: ‘Nothing you will ever do will rattle her.’
Today, Larry David, who played Hines quirky and neurotic Jewish husband on Curb Your Enthusiasm, may have to eat those words.
As a longtime confidant of Bobby’s told me when I was probing his marriages and his womanizing for his biography:
‘Any woman who gets involved with Bobby does so with her eyes open… Any woman who thinks they’re going to change Bobby is misguided and has to understand what she’s getting into with him.
‘You can hate it, you can make excuses for it, you can do whatever you want to do, it doesn’t change the fact that he has a long history of doing certain things. And if you think, Wow, I’ll be different, then you’re f**ked.’