Books
In “Unscripted,” the actress and wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discusses vaccines, her husband’s affection for roadkill and the time that meeting Trump made her break out in hives.
Of all the extras on this season of the Trump administration, Cheryl Hines has been among the most mystifying. The former “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress initially seemed to be a reluctant MAGA wife, keeping her distance from the controversial views of her husband, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As President Donald Trump’s second term has continued – and the Hines-Kennedy marriage has seemingly remained strong – however, that image has started to break down.
Hines just published her memoir, “Unscripted,” which details her journey from her Florida hometown to Hollywood to Washington. Along the way, it offers only glancing introspection on how Hines reconciles her former views as a Democrat with her new life. It is similarly vague on herpolitics, which she does not describe outright, but she declines to criticize her husband’s anti-vaccine brand of MAGA. Instead, she takes digs at her husband’s detractors, including the Kennedy family members who supported President Joe Biden and later, Vice President Kamala Harris, during the 2024 election.
Hines laid low for a little while after the inauguration, but in the lead-up to the book’s release, she has been a major presence on the talk show and podcast circuit. She spoke at an anti-vaccine conference last weekend in front of a poster of her book that read “HELP MAKE THIS BOOK A NYT BESTSELLER.” The book was published by Skyhorse, a right-leaning imprint whose author roster includes Trump allies Sean Spicer, Alan Dershowitz and Peter Navarro.
Here are seven takeaways from “Unscripted”about her time in the political spotlight.
Hines really wants readers to believe she isn’t political.
Describing her Florida childhood, she says politics weren’t discussed in her house, and she doesn’t know who her parents voted for. When Trump won in 2016, Hines “listened to country music and cried for a few hours.”
She says she “detested” how the 2000 Bush/Gore recount was handled, but decided to “disconnect from politics, not that I had been extremely involved in the first place.” Besides, she notes in the same paragraph, a lot of good things had happened to her in the Bush years: “I was cast on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ nominated for an Emmy, got married to Paul [Young, her first husband], and had Cat,” her daughter. A former Democrat, she switched her party registration to independent when her husband did.
Her life with Kennedy has always been interesting.
About halfway through the book – after Hines details her childhood, breakthrough in the entertainment industry and work on “Curb,” and first marriage – her story with Kennedy begins. They met, as has been previously reported, through Hines’s “Curb” co-star Larry David, at a 2005 ski fundraiser event for Kennedy’s Waterkeeper organization. They reconnected in 2011 when both were in the process of divorcing their spouses.
Hines described an early date of theirs, for which Kennedy took her on a boat ride to the Statue of Liberty, a night that made her swoon: “I would’ve sworn I was dreaming, but my feet were cold and the rancid smell of roadkill in Bobby’s minivan was enough to know all of it was real.” His proposal, she says, was impromptu, at a lake near Orlando, in front of Hines’s daughter,as well as her niece and nephew. They celebrated their wedding with a clambake at the Kennedy family compound.
Being with Kennedy opened up a life even more exciting than her Hollywood one, she says. She visited Cuba with him, meeting Fidel Castro: “Bobby and Castro talked for hours. They spoke about unsuccessful assassination attempts orchestrated by the US on Castro’s life. Bobby and Castro agreed his father and uncle were never involved.”
Her life with Kennedy has been wild in numerous ways. She recounts getting charged by a yak in Bhutan, and attacked by Toby, an emu that Kennedy got as a present for Hines’s daughter, Cat: “It got to the point where I couldn’t go into the backyard without carrying a shovel for protection.”
As for the most notorious story about Kennedy’s nonhuman companions, his own claim that he had contracted a brain worm, Hines dispatches with the parasite – and the media attention it attracted – quickly.
“I will admit, that story was one of the most entertaining,” she writes.
She tries to skirt the vaccine conversation.
“I would’ve been content to never have another discussion about vaccines again,” Hines writes, of getting her covid vaccination (which she notes was “required” for her work on “Curb”), “but that wasn’t going to be the case.” Given her speaking role last weekend at the annual Children’s Health Defense conference, it’s hard to take that remark seriously. “Both sides of the vaccine safety debate … are ultimately motivated by the same goal: protecting children’s health,” she later writes.
Hines writes that she didn’t like Kennedy’s combative tone when he spoke about vaccines. “Sometimes I didn’t like the language he used,” writes Hines. “ … I wanted to talk to him about the complications his outspoken beliefs were creating for me and the family, but it seemed like our discussions would lead back to him showing me studies and facts and figures about why he had taken up the fight.”
But she is unsparing in her anger for an “untrustworthy political pundit friend” who had leaked to Politico that an invitation to a holiday party at her and Kennedy’s home suggested people self-test “or be vaccinated,” language that Hines says was inserted at the suggestion of her assistant.
Hines is angry at the Biden administration and the Kennedy family.
When Kennedy was thinking about running for president, Hines was supportive but fearful for his safety. She remains angry at the Biden administration for denying Kennedy’s early requests for Secret Service protection, describing some of the threats their family endured. At one point, Hines was on an Instagram live stream with a friend, talking about her skin care company – a brand she mentions frequently – when she saw an intruder approach the house and be apprehended by their private security team (she kept it cool on the live stream and never let the audience know).
She frequently returns to her disappointment that many of Kennedy’s relatives did not support him – especially his siblings Joseph, Kerry, Kathleen, Max, Chris, and Rory – comparing them to a “swarm of bees.” She does not, naturally, delve into some of the remarks that may have caused them to distance themselves – for example, Kennedy’s onetime suggestion that covid was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. (Kennedy has claimed that his remarks about covid being ethnically targeted were misunderstood.)
“I also found myself sorry for them for choosing politics over family,” she wrote. “… I realized that they were not who I thought they were.”
Meeting Trump made her break out in hives.
Hines recounts that she and Kennedy met with Trump in Milwaukee in 2024 shortly after he survived the July assassination attempt that wounded his ear. Hines had planned to join Kennedy after that meeting, but her husband’s security detail unexpectedly delivered her to the meeting, at his request. Trump shook her hand and “commented on my good reputation in the entertainment industry. I replied that he might be speaking too soon.” After talking about the assassination attempt, Trump dictated a tweet to his now-chief of staff Susie Wiles demanding Secret Service protection for Kennedy.
The moment she left the meeting, Hines “broke out into hives,” she says. “One of Bobby’s staff joked that I must’ve been allergic to President Trump.” A photo in the book shows her swollen, distended lips – an effect, doctors told her, of extreme stress.
When Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump, Hines says she fielded “angry calls and texts” all night.
Hines’s friendships have suffered since her embrace of MAHA and MAGA.
Comedian Tig Notaro spoke last month about how she had to take a step back from the podcast she and Hines hosted together. Hines doesn’t have anything bad to say about Notaro in the book, though, saying, “Neither Tig nor I wanted to get bogged down in politics.”
But she’s still mad that Bradley Whitford, “an actor friend of mine,” criticized Hines in a tweet for staying “silent while your lunatic husband throws his support behind the adjudicated rapist who brags about stripping women of their fundamental rights.” She wonders,“Why didn’t Bradley just call me to see if he could talk me into revolting against my husband, if that was the goal?” She describes reading all the comments that attacked Whitford back as “oddly healing.”
She also calls out Laurie David, her co-star’s real-life ex-wife, who criticized her for attending her husband’s confirmation hearing, an event she approached using her acting training:Hines writes that she knew she would have to remain emotionless,comparing it to a scene from a film she had done with Richard Gere in which she had to play dead. “Even keeping as still as possible, with no notable expression, some late-night talk show hosts thought I was blinking too much, or perhaps I was blinking an SOS in Morse Code.”
At one point in the book, Kennedy tries to convince her to pretend she has left him, in order to preserve her Hollywood friendships.
“He pitched me on the idea of a fake separation,” she wrote, but she didn’t think it was a good idea: “I imagined paparazzi lurking around, trying to get photos of us together so they could break a story about how we actually weren’t separated.”
She doesn’t mention Olivia Nuzzi by name.
In September 2024, then-New York magazine star reporter Nuzzi was placed on leave after she acknowledged she had a “personal,” nonphysical relationship with Kennedy, whom she profiled in November 2023. In the course of a short-lived legal dispute, Nuzzi’s former fiancé, then-Politico reporter Ryan Lizza said that Nuzzi described the affair as “toxic,” “psychotic” and “indefensible,” and that she said her affair partner was a “70-year-old ‘sex addict’ who told her he wanted to ‘possess,’ ‘control’ and ‘impregnate’ her,” though Kennedy was not named in the filing.
Throughout this tawdry incident, Hines was top of mind for the gossiping masses: After she was spotted without her wedding ring shortly after the incident went public, many wondered if she would leave him.
Hines, who refers to Nuzzi only as a “political journalist,” writes that she was in Italy when she learned about the news.
“My first reaction was a wave of indifference. I didn’t care about what had happened, who said what, what was real, what wasn’t real, who was involved or why they were involved,” she writes. “I was fine with letting them all continue with the drama and the politics without me … it was the end of the line for me.”
When Hines returned from Europe, Kennedy picked her up from the airport, where they talked for an hour in their car while a security team watched. “I felt so distant from [Kennedy]. It seemed like the only threads that were connecting me to him were directly tied to all of our kids,” she writes. But they quickly reconciled: For the next few days, they “drilled down on the truth. We locked ourselves in our room and laid it all on the table.” Hines does not reveal what was discussed at all, but writes that the conversation “tightened our ties.”
Nuzzi, now an editor at Vanity Fair, will release her memoir next month.
Lauren Weber contributed to this report.
