Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared nude photos of women with his friends and appeared to joke about eating dogs, according to a report Tuesday.
A lengthy Vanity Fair article delving into the independent presidential candidate’s character also included a woman’s harrowing account of allegedly being groped by Kennedy while working for him family in the late 1990s. Kennedy’s campaign reportedly did not respond to questions about the alleged wrongdoing.
While married to his second wife, Mary Richardson, Kennedy was allegedly known to send photos of “nude women” to his friends, according to the report. The friends assumed that it was Kennedy who had taken the images, but they were unsure if the women in them “had consented to having their genitalia photographed, let alone shared with other people.”
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The piece also alleged that in an incident last year, Kennedy sent another photo to a friend traveling to Asia. The image appears to show Kennedy preparing to take a bite out of what looks like a barbecued dog, with a veterinarian confirming to Vanity Fair that the animal is a canine citing its 13 pairs of ribs and a distinctive “floating rib” seen in dogs.
Kennedy allegedly told the photo’s recipient that he might like a restaurant in Korea which serves dog, possibly indicating that he’d tried it. The photo’s metadata also reportedly indicates the photo was taken in 2010—the same year that he received his dead brain worm diagnosis. The person who received the image in 2023 reportedly found it insensitive for making light of animal cruelty, mocking Korean culture, and recklessly risking the reputations of both Kennedy himself and his family.
Elsewhere, the piece includes an account from Eliza Cooney who, at the age of 23, began working for Kennedy and Richardson in 1998 as a part-time babysitter, moving into their family home in Mount Kisco, New York.
Cooney claims one evening she felt Kennedy’s hand moving up and down her leg under a table during a meeting in the property’s kitchen. Weeks later, she alleges that she found a shirtless, then-45-year-old Kennedy in her bedroom, asking her to rub lotion on his back. “It was totally inappropriate,” Cooney, now 48, told the magazine.
Several months after that incident, Cooney claims she was in the kitchen pantry after a yoga class when Kennedy approached her from behind, blocking her in the room, and started groping her. She claimed she was left “frozen” and “shocked” during the alleged sexual assault, claiming that Kennedy put his hands on her hips and slid them up to her breasts. She claims Kennedy was interrupted when another worker came into the kitchen.
“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,” Kennedy wrote in an X post Tuesday.
Responding to the “other allegations” in an interview with the Hill’s web series Breaking Points, Kennedy said “I am not a church boy.” “I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” he added, before declining to comment on Cooney’s specific claims.
