Nicole Shanahan, who ignored repeated requests for comment on a Daily Beast story about her astonishing ascent to become Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, complained on Thursday that she was “slandered” and had to “take a walk to shake it off.”
Shanahan, who has been bankrolling RFK Jr.’s spoiler-ready campaign for president with the fortune she got in her divorce from Google founder Sergey Brin, did not raise any specific objection to the story, which she said she didn’t read until nearly a full day after it was published.
But she did go into detail about an almost cinematic encounter she had on her walk when she “pulled into a farmers market to say hello to the farmers.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“I walked by a young man on the empty side of the parking lot, who recognized me and said ‘Nicole Shanahan!’, and said he was a supporter of Bobby and watched my speech,” she wrote on X.
“He said he studied the psychology of politics in college. I told him about the article and how I was trying to walk it off. He told me he had watched the ‘Who is Bobby Kennedy’ film, which is specifically about how cruel and embarrassingly desperate the left-wing media can be.”
“He’s 23 years old. I looked up at the sky and then said to this young man ‘thank you, you are just what I needed in this moment to keep going strong.’ His name is Alex. Thank you Alex.”
The Daily Beast reached out to the Kennedy campaign after her post but did not get an immediate response. The Daily Beast could not reach Alex, because no last name was provided, but he can contact us at tips@thedailybeast.com at any time.
The story that Shanahan appeared to be referring to detailed her meteoric rise from a turbulent childhood in Oakland, California, to the wife—and then ex-wife—of one of the richest men in the country, as well as the running mate of a conspiracy theory-driven third-party presidential candidate who could hand the election to Donald Trump.
The Beast story, the result of more than a dozen interviews and several weeks of work, was highlighted by top tech journalist Kara Swisher on Threads on Thursday. In particular, Swisher noted that a source who has spent significant time with Shanahan scoffed at Kennedy’s description of her as an artificial intelligence expert, with the source saying that she “couldn’t differentiate ‘AI from a tennis ball.’”
Swisher then went on to add, “And more: Unsuccessful entrepreneur, losing lawyer, bloviating nonsense on all manner of things she has no expertise in, marriage incompetence and she’s just plainly a candidate for a thirsty wack job because she managed to get a pile of money from a tech billionaire who wanted her to go away.”
