Cheryl Hines has confessed that the first time she met Donald Trump, she broke out in hives so distressing, she looked like a casualty from plastic surgery show Botched.
The Curb Your Enthusiasm actress – and wife of Robert Kennedy Jr – had traveled to Milwaukee on the eve of the Republican Convention in 2024, expecting to join her husband after his meeting with the then presidential candidate.
Instead, she was ushered through a darkened parking lot and into a private hotel suite, where she found herself face to face with Trump – complete with a bandage on his ear following the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.
She was already suffering from stress, she writes in her new memoir, Unscripted, as Kennedy ramped up his own presidential campaign, first as a Democrat and then as an independent.
News about the attempted assassination on Trump on July 13, 2024, only added to her fears about her husband’s security.
‘Clearly, my concern for Bobby’s safety during the campaign was for good reason. I wished he wasn’t out there in crowds of people every day. The risk was too great.
‘Bobby kept calling me in between TV appearances that night,’ she writes. ‘News outlets wanted to talk to him about the assassination attempt.
Hines was concerned about her husband’s safety, as he ramped up his own presidential campaign, first as a Democrat and then as an independent
She found herself face to face with Trump – complete with a bandage on his ear following the attempt on his life
‘Later, he called me and said President Trump wanted to speak to him. It was almost midnight.’
Following that long phone call, Trump asked to speak to Kennedy in person.
‘My anxiety was reaching a new high,’ writes Hines. ‘What did this mean?
‘My therapist was getting desperate texts from me in the middle of the night. It felt like everything was happening too fast.’
After flying to Milwaukee, she had expected to simply be there as support for her husband, but was instead escorted into the meeting with Trump.
‘Oh my God. I wasn’t mentally prepared for this,’ she writes.
The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, and the moment she left, she broke out in hives.
‘I’ve never broken out in hives before, not once,’ she writes, ‘but suddenly I had hives all up and down my arms and I could feel them making their way across my abdomen.
‘Was I allergic to something there?
‘That night, one of Bobby’s staff joked that I must’ve been allergic to President Trump.’
Hines developed hives all over her body, and a puffy lip – ‘I really was a sight to see’
Her doctor rules out an allergic reaction and suggested she try to be less stressed
One of her husband’s aide’s suggested she must have been allergic to Donald Trump
As the evening wore on, the hives only got worse, making their way down her legs.
Then, at dinner, she started to feel something strange happen to her face.
Escaping to the bathroom, she looked in the mirror and saw her bottom lip had swelled to the size of a baby carrot.
‘Between my hives and my swollen lip, I really was a sight to see,’ she writes.
‘I looked like a casualty from Botched, the show about plastic surgery gone wrong.’
A doctor ruled out an allergic reaction and told her the unusual symptoms were probably caused by stress.
‘I’d advise you to try to find a way to not be so stressed,’ he suggested.
‘Oh, okay, I’ll work on that,’ I said as my rubbery lips bounced up and down.’
She was given steroids, and ‘flew home with my EpiPen in one hand and hiding my crazy lips with the other,’ she writes.
She spent the entire flight taking note of every time she swallowed, for fear her throat might close up.
‘It was the perfect kick-off to my new effort in finding a way to be less stressed as the doctor suggested.’
In the book, Hines also breaks her silence on the ‘digital affair’ her husband allegedly had with journalist Olivia Nuzzi – whose own memoir, American Canto, is out next month.
Kennedy called Hines to let her know she might soon be reading some salacious headlines. She was travelling in Italy with her daughters at the time the news broke that Nuzzi, after writing a profile on Kennedy for New York Magazine, had embarked on a romantic, though not physical, relationship with him.
‘Of course, I hated all of it,’ writes Hines. ‘The swirl of headlines, rumors, and insinuations was upsetting and overwhelming. I had hit a wall.
‘My first reaction was a wave of indifference. I didn’t care what had happened, who said what, what was real, what wasn’t real, who was involved or why they were involved.
‘I was fine with letting them all continue with the drama and the politics without me.’
After a year and a half of political campaigning, she writes that she had already been starting to feel ‘unimportant’ to Kennedy. News of the relationship, she writes, was the final straw.
‘It felt like a game people were playing and I wasn’t interested in participating. It was the end of the line for me.’
Rather than fly home to confront her husband, however, she decided to stay in Europe for a while.
After a year and a half of political campaigning, she had been starting to feel ‘unimportant’ to Kennedy
In the book, Hines also breaks her silence on the ‘digital affair’ her husband allegedly had with journalist Olivia Nuzzi
Dealing with the fallout from the ‘digital affair’ accusations has, said Hines, made her marriage stronger
‘Like many mothers do, I decided to table my breakdown until I was alone. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I returned home and saw Bobby again, but he was eager to talk to me.’
When she eventually returned to the US – she doesn’t say how long she stayed away – Kennedy picked her up from the airport and they immediately pulled into a parking lot to discuss the story and its fallout.
‘We probably talked for an hour while the security team watched over the car,’ she writes. ‘I felt so distant from him. It seemed like the only threads that were connecting me to him were directly tied to all of our kids.
‘I respected and adored them too much not to listen to what Bobby had to say.’
They continued to talk for the next few days.
‘We locked ourselves in our room and laid it all on the table,’ she writes.
‘We talked about all of the painful times we’d been through in the last few years and what we meant to each other. We analyzed how we had become disconnected and what had kept us together.
‘We went through all of the details about the latest story – what was true and what wasn’t.’
At the end of it all, she says, their relationship was stronger than ever.
‘Through those soul-searching days, we tightened our ties that bind.’
Unscripted by Cheryl Hines is published by Skyhorse
