Tatiana Schlossberg took shots at cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a poignant essay about her terminal cancer diagnosis, slamming the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services as an “embarrassment” to their storied family.
Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, shared her stance in a new piece for the The New Yorker on Saturday, where she once again denounced her cousin and reflected on his controversial health legacy.
“Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family,” Schlossberg wrote. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including [husband George Moran], didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs.”
She continued: “As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission.”
Outside of her criticism for Kennedy, Schlossberg shed light on her terminal cancer battle, explaining she’d been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and that may only live up to a year. Per the journalist, she learned about her disease in May 2024, after her doctor saw an imbalance in her white blood count.
“A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter,” she shared. “Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter.”
She went on to say that she couldn’t be cured “by a standard course,” and required a few months of chemotherapy, as well as bone marrow transplants. She later participated in a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” she shared. “I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”
Schlossberg credited her husband for doing “everything” for her amid her health fight, saying he spoke to “all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to” and “slept on the floor of the hospital.”
As she closed out her essay, Schlossberg said she’s now focusing on spending time with her family, though the “present is harder than it sounds.”
