A Harvard classmate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleged Friday that the failed third-party presidential candidate turned Donald Trump ally had sold him cocaine as a student.
The claim came from Kurt Andersen, the editor and author behind multiple scathing rebukes of Trump—including the infamous description in Spy magazine of the property scion as “a short-fingered vulgarian.”
“Sometime during my freshman year, I tried cocaine, enjoyed it, and later decided to procure a gram for myself,” Andersen wrote in the piece. He recalled asking a friend where he could get more, who pointed him to “a kid in our class who was selling.” That kid, he claims, was Kennedy.
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Andersen ventured to Kennedy’s dorm room. “He poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of (a) plastic drinking straw,” Andersen recalled what happened next. “We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money.”
Kurt Andersen attends an event on Nov. 9, 2017, in New York City.
Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesIn a lengthy profile of Kennedy Jr. published earlier this year, Vanity Fair claimed that, “at Harvard, in the mid-1970s, Kennedy was regularly injecting speedballs, a mixture of heroin and cocaine, and became a pied piper to friends and family.”
The thrice-married Kennedy has spoken openly about his drug addictions, most notably a heroin habit which began when he was 15 and followed him until he was 29, when he was charged with possession of the drug. In court, Kennedy announced to the judge, “guilty, your honor,” entering a plea that landed him two years of probation. He also went to rehab.
But there was no redemption on offer in Andersen’s account of their Ivy League years, which drew a through-line from Kennedy’s conduct at Harvard to his vaccine denialism, presidential hopes and the most bizarre revelations about his past.
“In retrospect, it has seemed to me a tiny illustration of… the man he became: fantastical pseudoscientific crusader, middle-aged preppy dick who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks with roadkill bear cubs he didn’t have time to eat,” Andersen wrote. “But the reason I decided finally to share this anecdote is because of a criminal-justice policy advocated by the presidential candidate he’s just endorsed.”
Kennedy Jr. on Friday suspended his presidential run and endorsed Trump—who has previously called for the death penalty for drug dealers (but has also “vouched” for two of them, as the Daily Beast has previously reported).
“Given that you sold cocaine in your youth,” Andersen concluded his piece, with a pointed question for Kennedy. “How do you feel about his advocacy of a regime that might have resulted in your own execution?”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Kennedy and Trump campaigns for comment.
