Cheryl Hines’ 10-year marriage reaches breaking point as ‘lifelong philanderer’ RFK Jr’s sexting scandal humiliates her yet again

She has made a career out of playing the long-suffering wife frequently humiliated by a husband whose outlandish proclamations burn professional relationships and end friendships.

But, with her marriage to Robert F Kennedy Jr, 70, life has increasingly and uncomfortably imitated art for Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, 58, whose reputation, career and friendships have taken hit after hit thanks to her husband’s political views.

First there was his rabid anti-vaccine campaigning amid the heat of the Covid pandemic, infamously suggesting that things were worse for anti-vaxxers than they were for Anne Frank.

Last month there was Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump – a move that came as he dropped out of the presidential race and that, by his own admission, might prove ‘catastrophic’ for his marriage.

Hines weathered it all.It rain

Now, it’s the revelation that Kennedy has been engaging in an affair with New York magazine political reporter Olivia Nuzzi that has really got people asking if this is the moment Hines kicks her bear corpse-dumping husband to the curb.

After all, she has put up with so much. She has seen work projects ‘paused’ and been lambasted by liberals for not speaking out against her husband’s presidential choice, though she has been very clear she disagrees with his stance.

Earlier this month the hate got so loud that Bill Maher stepped in to defend Hines from the ‘obnoxious posers on…the far left’ who ‘tweet screamed’ at her in their thousands. According to Maher, ‘Going after the wife… Even the mafia doesn’t do that.’

It’s 10 years since Hines and Kennedy married in a low-key but starry celebration in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. 

She wore a Jackie Kennedy inspired dress, guests dined on steamed lobster and a clam bake and Natasha Bedingfield serenaded the couple with her hit song, ‘Unwritten.’ Unraveled might be more apt today.

Olivia Nuzzi, 31, interviewed Kennedy – who New Yorker described as a ‘lifelong philanderer’ in a profile last month – in November 2023. She did so at the Californian home in Brentwood that he shares with Hines and their three dogs.

Five months earlier, from the same house, Hines gave a glowing interview to the New York Times saying how much she wanted her husband to feel ‘loved and supported’ by her.

Nuzzi and Kennedy went for a hike and exchanged numbers and, in the following weeks, exchanged a lot more – though, according to Nuzzi, who has been placed on leave from New York magazine, the relationship never rose above the level of sexting.

For his part, Kennedy insisted he only met Nuzzi – whose engagement to Politico Chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza was called off over the last few weeks – on that one occasion.

He also called the article the interview yielded ‘a hit piece’ and that the relationship was ’emotional and digital in nature, not physical’.

Regardless it’s a kick in the teeth for Hines. Once described by Larry David as ‘the one person in Hollywood who doesn’t have a single enemy,’ she has stuck by her husband at considerable personal expense.

It was David who introduced his Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star to Kennedy in 2006 at a ski-weekend fundraiser in Banff, Canada, for Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental nonprofit co-founded by Kennedy. 

Hines had no plans to ski, but told the New York Times, ‘The next thing you know, we’re in skis and we’re on a ski lift. I was looking at Larry like, “What is happening?” He’s like, ‘Yeah,’ giving an indication like, “That’s Bobby”.’

Both Hines and Kennedy were married to other people when they met. Hines was married to Paul Young, founder of the management firm Principato-Young with whom she has one daughter, Catherine, 20. 

Kennedy was married to his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. Kennedy filed for divorce from Mary in 2010 but she hanged herself in 2012 before proceedings were finalized.

By then Hines and Kennedy had reconnected. They went public with their relationship in October 2011 and married three years later.

Hines later admitted that David had never intended to play matchmaker and in fact gave her a hard time about the relationship saying ‘Why would you do that? Are you crazy?’

It’s a question she may well be asking herself today. By her own admission when she met Kennedy, she, ‘didn’t know a whole lot about the politics of it all,’ and only had a schoolgirl knowledge of her future husband’s political dynasty.

Still, as a wife who does not share her husband’s political views Hines remained publicly loyal to a fault and, as Maher so recently point out, received waves of criticism for ‘not throwing her husband under the bus,’ when he put his name and his clout behind Trump.

Kennedy too spoke up for his wife as she faced a vicious public backlash.

‘She is a lifelong Democrat,’ he told TMZ. ‘And the idea of me supporting Donald Trump… was, like I said, it’s something she would have never imagined, that she never wanted in her life.

‘I think it causes her a lot of discomfort.’

Discomfort is a feeling Hines must have got very familiar with across her 10-year marriage to Kennedy.

Just two years ago, following Kennedy’s anti-vax comments regarding Anne Frank, it got so bad that he suggested a faux separation in the form of a public announcement that would distance his wife from his statements and decisions.

Hines turned him down. But that was then. Today, with his affair with Nuzzi, he may just find that distance handed to him for real.