The wife of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s cousin and best friend has been noticeably absent from the FX series.

Here’s why Carole Radziwill isn’t portrayed on Love Story

The wife of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s cousin and best friend has been noticeably absent from the FX series.

By Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence is a former associate editor at **. He left EW in 2022.

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March 16, 2026 8:12 p.m. ET

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Carole Radziwill; Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette, Paul Anthony Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. in 'Love Story'. Credit:

Rich Polk/Bravo; FX

While there's been plenty of drama surrounding the portrayals in *Love Story*, just as much conversation has centered on who isn't in the series about the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette (as played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon). And we now have an answer regarding the reasoning for one of the biggest absences.

*The Real Housewives of New York City** *alum Carole Radziwill was close to Bessette and JFK Jr. She was actually married to the best man at their wedding, Anthony Radziwill, who was JFK Jr.s' cousin. (Anthony died from cancer in 1999, less than a month after Bessette and JFK Jr.'s fatal plane crash.) But Carole has not appeared on *Love Story* as a character, despite the fact that actor Erich Bergen has been a constant presence as Anthony.

“People’s lives are full and rich. There’s tons of people in them, and you have to make decisions,” *Love Story* producer Brad Simpson told *TV Insider* of not including Carole. “And a decision we made was to really focus on creating Lauren, [Bessette's] 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. We’re trying to pack a lot into 43 minutes.”

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. at the Municipal Art Society gala in 1997.

Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive/Getty

Before becoming an author and reality star, Radziwill was an Emmy-winning journalist, having worked at ABC News for more than a decade. On her Substack, Radziwill wrote about *Love Story* and the continued fascination with dissecting the lives of Bessette and JFK Jr.

"Sitting here now, we know how it ended," she said. "And yet the story keeps being told. Reinvented. Embroidered. 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."

She continued, "But now I am at peace with it all. 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."

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Actress Daryl Hannah, who dated JFK Jr. before his relationship with Bessette, recently penned a scathing essay about *Love Story*'s depiction of her. As played by Dree Hemingway, Hannah is shown doing cocaine and crashing the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. "The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue," she wrote. "Many people believe what they see on TV and do not distinguish between dramatization and documented fact — and the impact is not abstract. In a digital era, entertainment often becomes collective memory. Real names are not fictional tools. They belong to real lives."

For her part, Radziwill revealed that she won't be tuning into *Love Story*, but she suggested that others do. "Watch it," she said, "and fall in love with them the way we all did back then."

*Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette* has been a smash hit for FX, and new episodes are currently premiering on Thursdays.

Original Article on Source

Source: “EW Drama”