The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson

What Love Story Gets Wrong About Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Daryl Hannah

• Molly McPherson

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Episode Summary

When Ryan Murphy's Love Story dropped in 2026, it didn't just revive a 25-year-old story; it rewrote the reputation of two women for a streaming audience of millions. Molly McPherson breaks down what the show got wrong, what the sourced record actually says, and why Daryl Hannah's New York Times op-ed was a textbook crisis communications move. This is a case study in narrative power, media accountability, and what it costs when the story gets told wrong the first time.

What You'll Learn

  • Why the 1990s media environment was built to villainize women like Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and how that same machinery is running inside a 2026 streaming series
  • What data reveals about Daryl Hannah's coverage after her New York Times op-ed and why the numbers tell a story the headlines missed
  • The three reasons Daryl Hannah's op-ed worked when most public responses don't
  • Why a producer's candid quote about needing a narrative villain is the most honest and damaging thing said about Love Story
  • What Once Upon a Time, the 2024 biography by Elizabeth Beller, actually documents about the night of July 16, 1999, and how it dismantles the airport myth
  • The behavioral pattern that turns private people into public villains
  • Why silence is not a neutral strategy when a story already has momentum

Resources Mentioned


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Molly

Okay. I wanna start with the question. What does it take to get a fair shot at your own reputation? Here's what's been sitting with me lately. A woman dies in 1999, July. She never held office, never ran a company, never wrote a book. She was famous for who she married and for the next 25 years, the media kept her in a very specific box. Difficult, icy vain, dramatic a druggie a problem. And then Ryan Murphy makes a show. And suddenly in 2026, everyone is talking about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy again, and Darrell Hannah, and that's on Ryan Murphy. I don't wanna talk about the show exactly, but what happens when culture finally catches up to a story that was so drastically wrong? At a catastrophic level and what that tells us about reputation media and the systems that decide who the hero is. And I've got the data to back it up. I ran the numbers specifically on Darrell h and her guest essay that ran in the New York Times on March 6th, the Bio, Ms. Hannah is an actress, filmmaker, and philanthropist. The first line of the essay, Jacqueline Onassis once gave me some wise advice. She told me that while tabloids, magazines and newspapers often sold ridiculous lies, they were nothing more than bird cage liner By the next day. At the time, I found great comfort and consolation in those words. Boom, JackieO, big name drop right off the bat. This was a subtle move. But also a very powerful one. But she is combating the perception that I think was her biggest gripe about her portrayal in love story. All the chatter is around drug use. There was an episode in the series where she's at JFK Junior's apartment. She certainly was living there at least part of the time. JFK Junior comes home and she's there. With all her friends, and you could see people in the background doing drugs, specifically doing cocaine. They didn't show her doing cocaine, but she was adjacent to her. So love's story started framing her as this. Flighty actress right off the bat., And then there's the episode when Jackie o in a very over the top, performance by Naomi Watts. It's almost as if love stories stopped. And they said, okay, now we need to highlight Naomi Watts. So she gets nominated for an Emmy, and then we'll come back to the script and the tone of the script. But they had Darrell Hannah muscling herself into the Jackie O funeral piece. And that's the part where I think she really had the gripe because they framed her closer to a desperate pick me girl. And that's what I think bothered her. The next piece of the essay, Darrel Hanna says, in the digital age, stories do not disappear. Yesterday's news isn't tossed out with the morning paper and lies live on forever. They are archived, stream, clipped, MeMed, and resurfaced endlessly. By the time I got to this point, I said, there's no way Darrel Hanna wrote this. She had someone write it for it, but still it works. A dramatized portrayal can become for millions of viewers, the definitive version of a real person's life. But today. They no longer hold true. Now, Darrell, to her credit, or to her writer's credit, the PR team. What they did not do is what I'm always looking for because it's the typical behavior when people are caught in the negative news cycle instead of blaming the medium. The media, they blame the people consuming media. They make it your fault, the public's fault. Instead, she's lying blame on the technology, the algorithm, and perhaps the editorial choices that are made. But she's talking about culture here. But what she's highlighting is the state of media and how it's consumed today, and she chose to do it in a very traditional medium newspaper. Next, the choice to portray her. As I mentioned, this irritating, self-absorbed, whiny, inappropriate quasi former girlfriend, and that was no accident. In discussing the show love story, one of the producers explained and said, quote, given how much we're rooting for John and Carolyn Darrell, Hannah occupies a space where she's an adversary to what you want. Narratively in the story end quote. That's important, and Darrell Hanna has a right to correct that record because a television show, because it wasn't history defining who Darrell Hanna was. It was a television show and one that was heavily consumed and talked about on social media, and that becomes the new reputation. It's other people's perception that is aided by this program. Next, she writes the character, Darrell Hannah, in quotes, portrayed in the series is not even remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct, or my relationship with John. The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue. I've never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I've 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's death to a dog's. It's appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show. These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct and they are false. There it is. She's correcting the record. Now from a perception perspective, I. I was a little off on what most people were saying about the character. They felt that she was nothing close to Darrell Hann, and this is what Darrell Hanna is saying herself. I don't think she has a problem with how she was portrayed as an actress, because honestly, as someone who consumed media, when Darrell Hannah was at her. Apex, when she was a game, I think the actress captured her quite well. I think part of it is because the narrative of Carolyn and JFK Jr and Darryl Hanna. That's what's taking up all the media space, and that's what I always find interesting is the communication aspect, or more specifically the reputation piece of it and how the human choices that were made to shape it and shift it, come into play with this story. Let's go back to the numbers. I wanted to research the effect of this op-ed on Darrell Hannah. I wanted to know if she came out net positive or net negative. After this portrayal and from her writing this guest essay. So first from March, 2025 through now, the coverage around Darrel Hannah was essentially zero for much of the year flatline. That's important. Then it starts to bubble when love story comes out, and then it spikes 27.5 million. The vertical line on that chart, the New York Times, and what a guest essay can do when a cultural moment is already printed and ready. And the sentiment breakdown is what really tells the story. I just pulled out 200 articles about Darrell Hannah's guest essay in the New York Times 56.7% were positive. Only 7% were negative. The rest neutral or unclassified. So think about that. Darrell Hannah, who the show portrays in an unflattering light who is directly named in sourced accounts as someone who tested John Kennedy's patients during some of the hardest moments of his life, lands with the majority positive coverage. After writing that op-Ed Hannah was covered in the book Once Upon a Time, the Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, written by Elizabeth Bella. This is the book That love story is inspired by important, not based on, inspired by, in other words, the producers used. Elizabeth's book to outline the lives, and they took anecdotes from it, but they built off of that. They augmented the reputations and the stories and the anecdotes to turn it into a television program, but in the Elizabeth Beller book, it does not portray Dale Hannah as doing any drugs nor comparing a dog's death to Jackie or planting stories in the paper, or pressing John to marry her. There is a story about John and Darrell having a party and leaving it very messy, which upset Jackie and also upset. Jackie's housekeeper who really laid into John, but in the book she never mentioned drugs. Now one story that is true that was accounted in the book is about the dog, and this is where Darrell Hannah is getting some rough press based on Elizabeth Bella's reporting, when Jackie collapsed and was hospitalized on May 15th, John was not there. He was summoned to Los Angeles by Darrell, who wanted him to bring the ashes of the dog, and the dog was in the care of John Kennedy. And the dog died. Now, this is where I have empathy for Darrel Hannah. I'd be out of my mind if I left my dog and then my dog was killed on the street, so I would want my dog as well. So I, I'm not blaming her here. I'm on team. Darrel Hannah for that one she reported that Darryl did become upset because John had placed the ashes in a simple box rather than something more elaborate and in love story he's traveling with. And earn. But sources said that he was livid and, but John resisted making any waves. And once he'd done his Daryl dog duty, he simply rushed back to be with his mother. And it was John's childhood friend, Billy Nunan, who wrote that as John waved at the crowd from Jackie's 50th floor balcony, he said, can you believe this? They've been here for days. So the bond tying John and Darrell had been thin to almost nothing at that point. And now the threads had frayed to the last hold. And a, and in the book, according to a guest, Darrell made small talk at Jackie's funeral about how she met Jackson Brown. And even after Jackie died, Darrell had another dog that was sick and John was up in Martha's Vineyard, or it was Hyena's Port and Darrell's on the phone talking about her dog all the time. And John is there in the kitchen with friends saying, can you believe this? I just lost my mom. And all she wants to talk about is her sick dog. Now That part of the book, I think really captures what their relationship is. It's not that Darrel Hannah was a pick me girl, or that she pushed herself into John's life to get fame. What it shows is that perhaps Darrel Hannah, which not surprising, not unreasonable to assume, was centered around self Hollywood actress. At least based on this research here, and that's not a reputation. And that's not a reputation killer by any means that an actress or an actor in Hollywood thinks about themselves. So love's story. So now you can see, now you can see the Arc Love's story, takes anecdotes from a book and then kind of shape shifts it a little to create a better narrative. So in the end, okay. I even pulled a word cloud to see how Darrell Hannah Falls In all of the press mentions around love story, and she is a dominant term right alongside Carolyn Bessette, who is the biggest name in the word cloud. She inserted herself into this conversation on her own terms, and the press largely received it well. And that's why I think it was the right call. Now, a personal anecdote that I've covered in this podcast in the past, and this was years ago and I had a slightly different format, if you will. I did an interview with the commander at the Coast Guard Station Outta Woods Hole at the time. Of the accident in July of 1999, and I interviewed him from the response point of view, but I also added the anecdote of why I was there. In July of 99, I was living on Cape Cod, I was living in Falmouth, which in the part of Falmouth, which is right up from Woods Hole. And I was working at a radio station. I was a radio reporter, a stringer, where I worked part-time es essentially, but they would just put me on stories. But when I woke up that Saturday morning hearing the news about JFK Jr's plane missing at that point. I got in my car and I drove straight to the station, which was in Hyannis, and then I had to come all the way back to Falmouth and down to Woods Hole to get myself onto a boat to report about the search. Now, I wasn't supposed to be there because. President Bill Clinton at the time called all the reporters off the waters of Martha's Vineyard. And if you've ever been to Martha's Vineyard and taken the ferry ride, Martha's Vineyard to Nantucket is far, Hyannis to Nantucket is far. It's a, so you have like Martha's Vineyard to Nantucket is far, you'd usually go Hyannis in Nantucket, but you can take a ferry there. It's long. But Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard is a very short ferry ride. The waters from Woods Hole, which is the mainland to Martha's Vineyard, not that wide, they did not want that space to be inhabited by reporters.'cause you could imagine in 1999, the media tabloid culture, it would've been a frenzy on the water and it would have interfered with the search and rescue. So they got rid of all of the reporters. No one was allowed to be there except for one. Me, I was able to do it because I had a federal ID and I just happened to don a jacket. That was official and I put myself on that boat, very tabloid esque. It was like I was reporting for the National Enquirer, but I certainly didn't wanna be there to clog up the waters. I was part of the search and rescue, and I guess my angle, the way that I looked at it, was doing more of a profile on the search and rescue worse as opposed to the search and rescue itself. But. I definitely did the story about the search and rescue, and it went on the air, and of course it bounced all around the broadcast group. And I was told that the admiral, the first district admiral, who's up in Boston, who was down at Woods Hole, said, somebody find her and get her off that boat. Oops. That was me. But it was an incredible time and I have never forgotten it, and I especially have not forgotten the coverage. I was living the media culture at that point, and it was a very different time than now simply because of social media. And if we look at what. And even when we look at what the record shows about what happened on the night of July 16th, 99, according to the Once Upon a Time book, John and Carolyn left New York around six 30 in the evening. There was rush hour gridlock traffic. John made a regular stop at, Sunoco for gas. He already confirmed the plane was outta the hangar by three in the afternoon. He was meticulous about the pre-flight check, and according to the book, two girls at the airport watched his every move on the tarmac and later reported that he was methodical careful and thorough. He pulled out his pilot's operating handbook and read the. Pre-flight checks. So all of those facts are there and they're believable. And Carolyn arrived minutes after he did. There was no dramatic late arrival. No nail polish, no diva behavior. There were two people trying to get out of New York on a Friday night, stuck in the same traffic. Everyone else was stuck in. That's it. That's the whole airport story, but that's not what got told and that's why it matters. The version for Carolyn be. Was much different at that time. She was labeled as difficult. Icy vanity is what caused a delay, and that version spread because it fit a frame that already existed. This was not a culture that wanted to blame JFK Jr. They had to blame or villainize the woman. It's no different than what happened to Monica Lewinsky. She was exploited. Same with Anita Hill. Think about Marsha Clark, who was the prosecutor against oj. They called her a lawyer at and they criticized her looks. Back then, women who didn't perform their public role with sufficient gratitude or grace got punished for it. And for Carolyn, who was intensely private, who didn't smile on command, who didn't play along with the paparazzi, she was clearly hated. That made her fit the villain role perfectly. And according to the Once Upon a Time book, there was a strange compulsion in the coverage to be not just uninterested in her, but actively disparaging. And the flip side of that was obsessive attention. The tabloids couldn't stop writing about her, was simultaneously making sure every word made about her. Was bad. And that's what gets me, because the people who actually knew her described a completely different person according to Bella's book and also memoirs by Carol Roswell, who is married to John f Kennedy's, cousin Anthony Roswell, and also JFK Jr's assistant, two people who are actually inside Carolyn and John's world. They paint a portrait of someone who showed up for grieving friends who went out of their way for strangers, who took on an impossible public role without a manual or a publicist, and simply just tried her best. And how does a woman who accompanied friends to frequent hospital stays like Carol Radwell wrote about in her book, what Remains. How does she become the villain in this larger cultural narrative? Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was given the tabloid version, and that sustained for many, many years. And here's the point where crisis communication analysis gets interesting. The show portrays Darl Hannah in ways that are unflattering and some of what's in source record is genuinely unflattering. And Ryan Murphy's production just ran with it. But here we are, Darrell Hannah, heading into 2026 and facing a Ryan Murphy show. That's dramatizing a version of her that's not particularly sympathetic and a source record separate from the show. That's not flattering either, but what does she do? She writes an op-ed in the New York Times. And here's my read on that decision. It was the right call for several reasons. She got ahead of the narrative. She didn't wait for the show to define her and then react. She put her own voice into the conversation before the cultural moment peaked. And that's textbook crisis communication. You don't wanna be responding, you wanna be framing. And it got picked up in the press. It also got picked up on social media. People talked about it on Reddit, and she shifted the narrative using newspaper. Traditional newspaper, the same composition that Jackie O was saying, line the bottom of a bird cage, The New York Times, that signals seriousness. It signals that you have something substantive to say and not just a grievance to air. It puts you in a context that connotes credibility. And the third piece of it, she didn't go negative write in an op-ed that deliberately attacks the show. The people talking about the show or the source record complaining about the book would've backfired on her immediately. It would've looked defensive. It would've kept the unflattering details in the headlines, whatever she said. The fact that it landed with a 56.7% positive coverage tells you the tone was right. And lastly, it was the timing. The show drops, the cultural conversation explodes. Darrel Hannah comes in right behind the wake and drafts it right in, and she's everywhere. That is the moment where the voice carries the most weight, and she used it and the data confirms it. Do you think 27.5 million people were talking about Darrell Hannah, last year? No. Her name in the center of the word cloud, right along Carolyn Bessette. And how does this happen? How does a real person get flattened into a caricature that survives for decades when something goes wrong, a crisis, a scandal, a public failure. The story needs a villain, and the person who gets cast in the role is almost never chosen based on evidence. It's based on fit. Carolyn Fit. She was beautiful. She was private. She didn't perform for the cameras. She didn't look grateful enough. She was resistant in a way that 1999 read as hostility and the behavioral pattern that I want you to recognize when someone doesn't respond to pressure the way we expect, we fill in the gap with the worst possible explanation. She didn't smile. She was cold. She was arrogant. She didn't give the press or the tabloids what they wanted, so therefore she must have something to hide. But we mistake emotional opacity for guilt, and we mistake privacy for contempt. But here's the thing, the people spreading those stories aren't acting from malice. A lot of them generally believe the narrative, but because once the frame is set, everything gets filtered through that. But now what Darrel Hannah understood is something that Carolyn never had the chance to act on because in 2026 you can push back. You couldn't do that in 1999 because you didn't have platforms. You had to get press. To write something favorable about you, but now a Darrell Hannah can go to the New York Times. You have a public that has evolved and how it thinks about women being defined by someone else's narrative. Reputations are not permanent. That's good news and bad news. The bad news is that a story told Fast told wrong in a high volume environment can define someone for decades. The tabloid version of CBK outlasted her by 25 years. She died at 33. She's been dead longer than she's been alive, and people are still arguing about whether she made a pilot wait at the airport. But the good news is that the narrative can shift. And they do. When the standards change, when new voices get a platform, when a book reopens a case, the story gets told again. And when someone like a Darrell Hannah decides to use the moment to speak, the press and the public can receive it. But the people who pay the costs of the first telling are usually the ones who don't get to see the correction or they deflect it. And that's why getting it right the first time matters. Don't blame. Don't deflect Don't go silent. Tell your story. The narrative you set in a crisis doesn't stay contained to the crisis. It travels, it calcify, it becomes a thing. People Google 25 years later when someone makes a show about it, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy didn't get a second act. She didn't get to write an op-ed. She didn't get to show up to the conversation on her own terms, but her story is getting a second read, and the women connected to that story are finally getting to speak. Let's make sure we build a media culture where it doesn't take 25 years. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Bye for now.

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Molly McPherson

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