There is no love lost between Kennedy descendant Jack Schlossberg and Ryan Murphy, the creator behind the new TV show about the Kennedy family, Love Story.
“If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy,” Schlossberg, 33, said in a new interview on CBS Sunday Morning.
“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,” Schlossberg, who has called Murphy a “pervert” and said his family was never consulted for the show, added.
Murphy’s new FX show, Love Story, imagines the private lives of the most public couple of the ’90s: JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. The show recreates some of their public moments, including the launch of JFK Jr.’s political magazine, George, and the couple’s widely photographed Central Park argument.
Despite the immense media coverage surrounding their relationship, the couple was intensely private. Much of the show has been dramatized and interpreted from interviews, news articles, and biographies of its central figures.
“I would just want people who do watch the show to watch it with one letter in mind, and that’s a capital ‘F’ for fiction,” Schlossburg said.
Schlossberg, JFK’s only grandson, said that the show couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The Kennedy family name has resurged in popular culture, Schlossberg said, partly because of his first cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., being appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services, and partly because “Donald Trump has used JFK as sort of a human punching bag.”
Schlossberg slammed the president for “renaming the Kennedy Center after himself,” for “doing a false reinvestigation into the assassination,” and for “dismantling all the programs that he fought for.”
“There’s a lot of misinformation now and iconography being used about the Kennedy family—my family—at a time when we really can’t afford to confuse people,” Schlossberg, who is currently running for a congressional seat in Manhattan, said.
When photos from the Love Story set first leaked last summer, Schlossberg maligned the show—and its showrunner—for its “grotesque” portrayal of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
Since then, Murphy, 60, and Schlossberg have engaged in a public back-and-forth. “I thought it was an odd choice to be mad about your relative that you really don’t remember,” Murphy said last year.
Near the end of his interview, Schlossberg doubled down on his hope that Murphy would contribute to his uncle’s causes.
“I would hope that Mr. Murphy would donate some of the millions of dollars of profits that he’s making to maybe some of the causes that John championed throughout his life,” Schlossberg said.
“We really need to take every breath that we have to try to make things better,” he continued. “So, if Ryan Murphy really cares so much about the Kennedy family, my uncle John, maybe he would try to do something about getting Trump out of power.”
The first five episodes of Love Story are available to stream on Hulu. The remaining four episodes will be released each Thursday.
