Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted on Tuesday that he has “skeletons in his closet” after being accused of sexually assaulting a babysitter more than two decades ago.
The bombshell allegations, the result of a monthslong investigation by Vanity Fair, surround Kennedy’s inappropriate behavior in the late ‘90s towards Eliza Cooney, a then-23-year-old woman hired by him and his second wife, Mary Richardson, to look after their four children.
The report outlines how, on one night in 1998, Kennedy allegedly began harassing Cooney, rubbing his hand on her thigh under a table.
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“It seemed like he thought I was somebody else or wasn’t paying attention,” Cooney wrote in a contemporaneous diary entry reviewed by Vanity Fair. “Like he would come to every once in a while and snap out of it or I would move away. It was like he was on something or really tired or was missing Mary or was testing me.”
Weeks later, he approached her shirtless late at night and asked her to rub lotion on his back. She complied “reluctantly and quickly,” according to Vanity Fair. In another instance after that, Kennedy allegedly cornered her in the kitchen and groped her hips and breasts. Cooney, now 48, said she lasted a few more months in the job.
The independent presidential candidate’s team did not respond to a detailed list of questions from the magazine. But in a sit down interview with Saagar Enjeti, a co-host of the web series Breaking Points, Kennedy appeared to hand-wave the report away, chalking them up to his roguish ways.
“Listen, I’ve said this from the beginning. I’m not a church boy. I am not running like that. I said in my—I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” he said. “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they—if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world. So, you know, Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories. And, I’m not, you know, going to comment on the details of any of them, but it’s, you know, I am who I am.”
Pressed by Enjeti on the specifics of Cooney’s allegations, Kennedy declined to comment.
He was more forthcoming about another part of the investigation—a photo of the scion holding up and eating what a veterinarian identified to Vanity Fair as a barbecued dog.
“It’s actually me eating a goat in Patagonia,” Kennedy explained.
He later posted the same photo on X, formerly Twitter, and reiterated his claim—while denigrating Vanity Fair’s reporting as the “DNC media’s garbage pail journalism.”
“Hey @VanityFair, you know when your veterinary experts call a goat a dog, and your forensic experts say a photo taken in Patagonia was taken in Korea, that you’ve joined the ranks of supermarket tabloids.” he wrote. “Keep telling America that up is down if you want. I’ll keep talking about the fact that working families can’t afford houses or groceries because our last two presidents went on a $14 trillion debt joyride, paid for by hard-working Americans.”
