Robert F. Kennedy Jr appears poised to be among the most influential figures in Donald Trump’s second White House stint, but he’s not without his baggage.
The 70-year-old Kennedy scion gained favor with the president-elect after he scrapped his own presidential run this summer and threw his full weight behind getting Trump elected.
Kennedy’s return to the national limelight this election cycle resurfaced a slew of scandals, conspiracies, and oddities that have earned him his reputation over the years. Below is a look at a handful of the most notable.
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Womanizer allegations while married
The thrice-married Kennedy has long been characterized as a serial philanderer, but perhaps nothing drove that point home as much as his old sex diaries from 2001 that were reportedly obtained by the New York Post.
Kennedy was said to have used diaries to document the dozens of women he took to bed that year. The entries were reportedly complete with creepily specific details that included the names of his sexual partners, their occupations, and a numerical designation—between one and 10—that marked how far they took things.
Kennedy was in his seventh year of marriage to his second wife, Mary Richardson, at the time. The environmental lawyer spent many days on the road, however, and the Post reported that’s where he’d score his alleged hookups. That bombshell report was published in 2011—a year after Mary Richardson took her life amid a messy divorce with the scion, and two years before Kennedy married the actress Cheryl Hines.
It’s since emerged that Kennedy wrote in other journals, also obtained by the Post, that he was a slave to “wild impulses” and “powerful demons” when it came to sex. A Vanity Fair profile of Kennedy also alleged this summer that Kennedy known to send photos of “nude women” to his friends during his second marriage and that he’d allegedly groped a woman who worked for him during the 1990s.
An OG election denier
Sixteen years before Trump unleashed the biggest election-fraud hoax in U.S. history, Kennedy flirted with a bit of election denying himself. Specifically, he claimed there was evidence in the numbers to suggest the 2004 election was stolen from Democrats.
That take emerged right after George W. Bush won re-election over his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. Kennedy went on the record to question if the election results were legitimate and claimed there was a coordinated “media blackout” to dismiss fraud claims. He aired out his grievances in a lengthy column published by Rolling Stone.
“I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” he wrote. “Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election.”
Assassination conspiracies
Kennedy has revealed over the years that—like many Americans—he has his own conspiracies regarding the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
Among his claims, as he recently reminded in an interview on Fox News, is that JFK was murdered by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1963 and that there’s been a “60-year cover-up.” He added that “most” of those involved in the investigation of the Dallas shooting “believe that it was the CIA that was behind it—because the evidence was overwhelming to them.”
Kennedy has also questioned whether the right man was convicted for assassinating his father, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that Kennedy had poured over evidence and even visited the site of his dad’s slaying.
“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” he told the Post. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
A fixation with dead animals
A trio of bizarre stories involving Kennedy and dead animals went viral in the waning months of his presidential campaign. The incidents—involving a whale’s carcass, a decomposing bear cub, and a contested report of a “barbecued dog”—all resurfaced or emerged for the first time this summer. Kennedy even recently bragged himself that he’s been “picking up roadkill my whole life” that he has a “freezer full of it.”
First off, the bear: Kennedy revealed this summer he was the person who infamously dumped a bear carcass in Central Park in 2014, apparently in hopes it’d appear like a cyclist hit and killed the animal. Nobody bought that theory, however, and the carcass became a media mystery that sparked an animal cruelty probe. It was Kennedy all along, he finally admitted. He added that he initially planned to skin the bear and eat it—after finding it roadside in the Hudson Valley—but decided to just dump it in the park because he’d otherwise miss a flight. “It was [in] very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he explained.
Second, the whale: Kennedy’s daughter, Kick, revealed in a 2012 interview that her dad once beheaded a dead whale and, bizarrely, tied its head to the roof of their family minivan before embarking on a five-hour drive. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” she told Town and Country. The story resurfaced in August, prompting calls for Kennedy to be probed for possibly violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Lastly, the dog: Vanity Fair reported in July that Kennedy might have dined on a barbecued dog in 2010 while in Korea. The article included photo to back up its claim, but the type of cooked animal photographed wasn’t entirely clear—despite a veterinarian telling the magazine the animal’s rib cage suggested it was a canine. Kennedy countered by insisting the suspected pup was actually a goat, and that the photo was from South America, not Asia. Kennedy hit at Vanity Fair and asserted that the magazine had “joined the ranks of supermarket tabloids.”
The infamous brain worm
In what appeared to be the first domino in a string of bizarre Kennedy news cycles this year, a report in May revealed that Kennedy once suffered from a brain worm.
The New York Times reported that, back in 2010, Kennedy’s “memory loss and mental fogginess” became “so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor.” Kennedy went to the doctor and, after a brain scan, doctors spotted a dark area in his brain and concluded he had a tumor. The physician was ready to schedule Kennedy for a surgery the next day but, apparently, another doctor had reached a different conclusion: There was a “dead parasite in his head.”
In an interview with Piers Morgan in June, Kennedy said the second doctor’s theory proved to be true. He said he “ended up getting treated” for his symptoms and that the worm was not “any kind of a threat to me.” Still, it became the subject of countless Kennedy memes this summer.
Alleged sexting with a reporter
In what’s been pointed to as proof that Kennedy remains a womanizer even in his seventh decade, allegations emerged in September that said New York magazine’s star reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, had engaged in a “personal relationship” with Kennedy.
The relationship supposedly began after Nuzzi, 31, penned a splashy profile of Kennedy in late 2023. That bombshell revelation came about a month after Kennedy and Hines, 58, celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversary.
Information about the supposed relationship leaked out slowly, with insiders eventually telling Page Six that Nuzzi was “madly in love” with the ex-presidential candidate and that they shared “endless texts.” That report also claimed the two exchanged “I love yous” and had an affair that lasted nearly a year, complete with “incredible” FaceTime sex and speaking on “long calls.”
The pair never had a physical relationship, Nuzzi said. Kennedy has largely ignored the scandal besides making a statement to deny the relationship and assert that he only met Nuzzi once—for her interview of him last year. Nuzzi, who was engaged amid the alleged affair, has since “parted ways” with New York magazine.
Blamed school shootings on antidepressants
Kennedy claimed on a podcast with Bill Maher last year that an increase in mass shootings is linked to the heightened use of antidepressants—a take that presented without hard evidence and was quickly shot down by scientists.
“Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history where kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” he said. “It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”
Joining Kennedy in making this claim, the Times reported, has been the right-wing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Don’t forget those vaccine conspiracies
Perhaps the first thought most people have when they hear Kennedy’s name is his staunch opposition to many vaccines. It was his fervor against the COVID-19 vaccine alone that appeared to inspire his recent political rise, with him even taking aim at Trump for his relative support of the coronavirus vaccine.
Backing things up, Kennedy has long questioned the effectiveness of certain vaccines but has also insisted he’s not entirely “anti-vax.” Among his most controversial healthcare takes included the time he repeated the discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism and that HIV stems from a vaccine program.
More recently, Kennedy suggested the coronavirus vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” He also claimed, without proof, that the COVID-19 vaccine was being developed to control people via microchips. He also likened the implementation of “vaccine passports” to living in Germany during the Holocaust, and appeared to suggest that the coronavirus was engineered to specifically spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Kennedy has largely cooled his anti-vax rhetoric in recent months and has, for the most part, instead focussed on how he can make the food Americans eat healthier.
