While viewers can’t get enough of the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy on FX’s “Love Story,” they haven’t seen one person important to their story.
Carole Radziwill, longtime “Real Housewives of New York City” cast member, was married to Anthony Radziwill, JFK Jr.’s cousin, until his death from cancer at 1999, less than a month after JFK Jr., Bessette Kennedy and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died in a plane crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Carole Radziwill attended the Kennedy-Bessette wedding, notably sharing intimate photos from the nuptials with CNN in August 2025, and wrote about her grief over the loss of her husband, his cousin and her friend Bessette in a 2007 memoir, “What Remains.” But she has not been portrayed in the series at all to this point.
Anthony Radziwill is played by Erich Bergen in “Love Story.” His cancer diagnosis was a major plot point of the Episode 7, which aired March 12.
Carole Radziwill was a big presence in the life and death of JFK Jr. and Bessette Kennedy. She gave a reading for Bessette Kennedy at her memorial service in Greenwich, Connecticut, per a program from the service shared by Christ Church Greenwich.
Though she’s not appeared in the show, Carole Radziwill has shared her thoughts on the dramatization.
“No, I won’t be watching. But you should—watch it, and fall in love with them the way we all did back then. Just… don’t DM me, ; )” she wrote on her Substack in February.
What Was Carole Radziwill’s Relationship to John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy?
Carole Radziwill was married to Anthony Radziwill, the son of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ sister, Lee Radziwill.
Anthony Radziwill served as the best man at the wedding of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, as depicted in “Love Story.”
Carole Radziwill and Bessette Kennedy were close.
“The real woman was neither a slave to fashion nor timid. She was a protector—the one who could crack open a desperate moment with a perfectly timed quip, fierce enough to make you rethink everything, soft enough to take your hand and guide you through anyway,” Carole Radziwill recently wrote on her Substack.
Carole Radziwill previously said Bessette Kennedy called her from the plane before the crash.
“Carolyn called me from the plane right before they were taking off,” she said in a 2017 episode of “How It Really Happened.” “I don’t remember anything really important from that conversation. I certainly didn’t think it would be the last time I would speak to my friend.”
She also has a vivid recollection how that call ended.
“I remember at the end, she said, ‘I love you,’ ” she said. “For some reason, I didn’t say ‘I love you back,’ and that always stuck with me.”
What Has Carole Radziwill Said About ‘Love Story’?
Ryan Murphy is the producer of “Love Story.” Before the show premiered in February, Carole Radziwill, didn’t reveal too much when asked for her thoughts on the premise of the show.
“My book is a specific story about my life with my husband and with my best friend and cousins,” she told “Entertainment Tonight” in November 2025. “And what (Murphy’s) going to do is different. And he does what he does and I do what I do. People will watch it or they won’t. I’m not going to engage in it too much.”
In her Substack post about the show, Carole Radziwill reflected on all the different iterations of the story told about JFK Jr. and Bessette Kennedy.
“First came the biographies, then the documentaries, and now the scripted TV shows—hyper-dramatic, moody lighting, and vaguely believable,” she wrote. “It happened slowly at first, then at warp speed. I suppose it’s the predictable evolution of a story that keeps insisting on being told.”
She wrote that as the story continues to be told, it’s become “filled with details no one could possibly know, by people who weren’t there and don’t care about the truth.”
“We think we own our stories. We don’t. Not in life, and certainly not in death. That is the quiet theft—slow at first, then at warp speed,” she wrote.
“But now I am at peace with it all,” she added. “I no longer worry about misrepresentations, false narratives, or bent truths. I don’t flinch at flat, lifeless descriptions or cornball storylines. I don’t care whether people get it wrong, get it right, or ever know what they were really like.”
Why Isn’t Carole Radziwill In ‘Love Story’?
Carole Radziwill’s absence in “Love Story” has certainly not gone unnoticed. When asked about the omission, executive producer Brad Simpson said there was a conscious effort to focus more on Bessette Kennedy’s sister.
“People’s lives are full and rich. There’s tons of people in them, and you have to make decisions,” he told TV Insider. “And a decision we made was to really focus on creating Lauren, her sister, as a character because she was often an afterthought in all of this. And so we thought it was important that, when Carolyn needed a confidant, it be her sister because they were very close.”
“There were tons of people in their lives that we weren’t able to include, including some of John’s closest friends, but we decided to make Lauren her closest confidant, and then Anthony his closest confidant, right?” he added. “You know, we’re trying to pack a lot into 43 minutes.”
“Love Story” has courted controversy for the people it does include in the series. Jack Schlossberg, the son of Caroline Kennedy — portrayed by Grace Gummer in the show — has called the show a “grotesque display of someone else’s life.”
Daryl Hannah, who dated JFK Jr. before he married Bessette Kennedy, has slammed the show for its depiction of her, as portrayed by Dree Hemingway.
“The character ‘Daryl Hannah’ portrayed in the series is not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John. The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month.
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