In The Know

Cheryl Hines says she’d embrace being RFK Jr’s first lady: ‘Let’s do it’

by Judy Kurtz

Cheryl Hines says it was never her fantasy to be first lady, but she’d welcome it if her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wins his long-shot White House bid.

“If you’re asking me, ‘Has this been my dream, to be first lady?’ I would say, ‘No,’” Hines said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published Thursday.

“But if someone said to me: ‘Guess what? You’re going to be first lady tomorrow,’ I would say, ‘Great. Let’s do it. I can’t wait to see what this looks like,’” the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star said.

“When I look at it like that, I think, ‘Wow, what an extraordinary situation.’ And if that’s what life hands you, then you accept it and experience it for everything it has to offer,” Hines, 58, said.

Kennedy, who’s running as an independent after initially launching as a Democrat, has polled in the double digits in the 2024 presidential race. But Hines said her husband’s candidacy is likely more a threat to former President Trump’s campaign than President Biden’s.


“If anyone is looking at polls, Trump is ahead without Bobby being involved,” she said.

“Bobby actually has a lot of Republican supporters. He has a lot of independent supporters and a lot of Democratic supporters. My opinion, just seeing what I see, is that Bobby is more likely to take votes from Trump than he is votes from Biden,” she said.

More top stories from The Hill:

Hines said her 70-year-old spouse, whom she married in 2014, is “pretty candid about his past — and I guess the womanizing of it is a part of his past.” The Hollywood Reporter noted how Kennedy said last year that he once told his wife, “I got so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I would be king of the world.”

“When you have a previous president who was just on trial for rape and he’s still the front-runner for the Republican nomination, I don’t know how important it will be,” Hines said.

Last year, a jury found Trump sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and later defamed her. The jury found there was insufficient evidence that Trump committed rape.

Hines also addressed the environmental lawyer and prominent vaccine skeptic’s embrace of conspiracy theories — he’s questioned the government’s explanation of what happened in the Sep. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the origins of COVID-19, and that the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.

Asked if it ever occurred to her that Kennedy, the son of former senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, “may have a predilection toward conspiracies,” the actor responded, “No.”

“That never occurred to me,” Hines said. “At the same time, I often think about what his life has been like — to watch his uncle be assassinated and then watch his father be assassinated.”

“I do find it mysterious and odd and all of it to be larger-than-life,” she said.

In The Know