Love Story, the Ryan Murphy–produced show about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, has plunged us all into Kennedymania. Well, not everyone. On Friday, Daryl Hannah, who dated JFK Jr. for more than five years before his marriage to CBK, published a scathing New York Times op-ed about the show’s portrayal of her, which she described as “irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate.”
Hannah, who appears as a character in the show (played by Dree Hemingway) for a few episodes before JFK Jr. and Bessette start their relationship in earnest, denounced her depiction as “not even a remotely accurate representation of my life.” “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s,” she wrote, calling the show’s choice to cast her in this light “textbook misogyny.”
Love Story’s producer Nina Jacobson explained earlier this month that the show didn’t reach out to Hannah in advance because “given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” In her op-ed, Hannah hit back against this line of reasoning. “Storytelling requires tension. It often requires an obstacle. But a real, living person is not a narrative device,” she wrote.
In the weeks since the show’s premiere, Hannah said she’s “received many hostile and even threatening messages from viewers who seem to believe the portrayal is factual.” “These are not creative embellishments of personality,” she went on. “They are assertions about conduct — and they are false.”
Hannah isn’t the only member of the Kennedy family’s inner circle who’s spoken out strongly against Love Story. On Sunday, Jack Schlossberg — JFK Jr.’s nephew who is currently running for Congress in New York — called the show “grotesque” in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy,” Schlossberg said. “The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about, and he’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.”