{"id":1036810,"date":"2024-07-03T10:45:04","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T14:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democrats.org\/?p=1036810"},"modified":"2024-07-03T10:45:05","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T14:45:05","slug":"vanity-fair-rfk-jr-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-villains-in-american-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/vanity-fair-rfk-jr-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-villains-in-american-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Vanity Fair: RFK Jr. Could be \u201cOne of the Greatest Villains in American History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Today, brutal new reporting from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/news\/story\/robert-kennedy-jr-shocking-history\"><em>Vanity Fair<\/em><\/a><em>, reveals disturbing details about RFK Jr., completely upending his claims of being the most transparent candidate in history and a moral authority.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The endless list of RFK Jr.\u2019s dangerous and grotesque behavior casts doubts on his fitness for office. As one friend put it, RFK Jr.\u2019s campaign could cause him to go down as \u201cone of the greatest villains in American history.\u201d&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Vanity Fair<em> reveals RFK Jr. groped and assaulted the family babysitter and kept x-rated photos on his phone of multiple women &#8211; possibly without their consent. While he prides himself on being an environmental attorney, he\u2019s been fired from every job he\u2019s ever had and ousted from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/airmail.news\/issues\/2024-6-29\/shades-of-green\"><em>multiple environmental organizations<\/em><\/a><em>. And to top off these twisted stories, the story includes a photo of a grinning RFK Jr. holding up a barbequed dog like a prize.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>In response, DNC Senior Advisor Mary Beth Cahill released the following statement:&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cEvery pertinent detail we have learned about RFK Jr. and his fitness for office has come from the media, not him. Despite his claims of being the most transparent candidate in history, he has refused to share with voters his personal financial disclosure, his tax returns, or his medical history.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis latest report is extremely disturbing and raises even more questions about his fitness for public office. He touts his environmental work on the campaign trail, but now we\u2019ve learned he was pushed out of multiple environmental organizations. He\u2019s said he will be an advocate for women, but a former family babysitter says that he repeatedly groped her without her consent. Like Donad Trump, he is plagued by scandal and a closet full of shocking skeletons.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s a reason why the people who know RFK Jr. best- his family members- are not supporting him. And details like the ones included in this story are why the more voters learn about him, the less they like him. He is dangerous and simply unfit to be president.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/news\/story\/robert-kennedy-jr-shocking-history\"><strong>Vanity Fair<\/strong><\/a><strong>: RFK Jr.\u2019s Family Doesn\u2019t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By Joe Hagan&nbsp; <strong><em>&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. <strong><em>In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with t<\/em><\/strong><strong><em>he barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog.<\/em><\/strong> Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting <strong><em>Kennedy had sampled dog.<\/em><\/strong> The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file\u2019s metadata\u2014the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong><em>When Kennedy was married to his second wife, Mary Richardson, he was known to text other damning images to friends as well\u2014of <\/em><\/strong><strong><em>nude women.<\/em><\/strong> Those friends assumed Kennedy himself had taken the pictures, but they<strong><em> didn\u2019t know whether the subjects had consented to having their genitalia photographed<\/em><\/strong>, let alone shared with other people.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In the fall of 1998, the Kennedys hired a 23-year-old woman, Eliza Cooney, as their part-time babysitter. [&#8230;]\u00a0 Cooney moved into Bobby and Mary\u2019s family home in Mount Kisco, New York, taking care of the kids and assisting Bobby at his environmental law clinic at Pace University during the week.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One night Cooney attended a meeting in the family kitchen with Kennedy and another young Riverkeeper volunteer named Murray Fisher to discuss business when <strong><em>she felt Kennedy\u2019s hand moving up and down her leg under the table<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Weeks later<strong><em>, she discovered Kennedy standing in her bedroom. She saw that her diary, which chronicled her daily activities and detailed her romantic life with a boyfriend, was open next to her bed. And she was shocked when a shirtless Kennedy, then 45, asked her to rub lotion on his back.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A few months later, Cooney says, she was rifling through the kitchen pantry for lunch after a yoga class, still in her sports bra and leggings, when<strong><em> Kennedy came up behind her, blocked her inside the room, and began groping her, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them up along her rib cage and breasts. <\/em><\/strong>\u201cMy back was to the door of the pantry, and he came up behind me,\u201d she says, describing the alleged sexual assault. <strong><em>\u201cI was frozen. Shocked.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Cooney stayed on the job for a few more months but <strong><em>says the experience damaged her confidence and diverted her from environmental work.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong><em>Kennedy\u2019s meeting with Trump was the inflection point that broke his relationship with Riverkeeper,<\/em><\/strong> the nonprofit for which he was the chief prosecuting attorney and the public face.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>For years the board and <strong><em>staff had been engaged in an uncomfortable <\/em><\/strong><strong><em>internal debate about whether a science-based group like theirs should be led by a man making anti-scientific claims<\/em><\/strong><strong><em> about vaccines and who, for good measure, opposed eco-friendly wind-powered turbines<\/em><\/strong> off Hyannis Port that happened to mar his family\u2019s ocean views. His allies at other environmental groups, like the <strong><em>Natural Resources Defense Council, had already had similar conversations and parted ways with Kennedy over the vaccine issue in 2014.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The Trump meeting spurred a revolt inside the nonprofit, with <strong><em>employees threatening to quit en masse if Kennedy wasn\u2019t ousted.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In 2018 Kennedy involved himself in a largely forgotten vaccine controversy in the American Samoan islands. That year, two children died after receiving the MMR vaccine, sparking an island-wide furor. Though it was later revealed that two nurses made a critical error administering the vaccines, accidentally introducing expired muscle relaxants into the formula, <strong><em>Kennedy\u2019s nonprofit took to social media to hype the deaths as evidence of vaccine dangers.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Over the ensuing months, the island was hit by the largest measles outbreak in its history, infecting 5,707 citizens and killing 83 people, most of them children. Later one of Kennedy\u2019s biggest critics, a pediatrician and member of the FDA\u2019s advisory committee on vaccines, Paul Offit, told PBS that <strong><em>\u201cRobert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In November of 2019 <strong><em>Kennedy sent a letter to the prime minister<\/em><\/strong>, obtained by Scott Kennedy and shared with Vanity Fair, <strong><em>speculating that the measles outbreak might be attributed to the vaccine itself.<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When Kennedy emerged as a candidate for president, in April 2023, <strong><em>his body and face had become transfigured by what he has called a regimen of \u201corganic testosterone.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> Kennedy showed off his unusually puffy body in campaign workouts, going shirtless in an infamous push-up video. <strong><em>\u201cI mean, he\u2019s unrecognizable,\u201d says a family intimate who has known him for decades. \u201cIt\u2019s like a body-snatching thing.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Fifty-six years after the death of Robert F. Kennedy, the stage belongs to Bobby Jr., even as <strong><em>he has morphed into something closer to Donald Trump than anything related to his father or uncle<\/em><\/strong>, cultivating power, like Trump has, by sowing distrust and peddling misinformation.<strong><em> Kennedy\u2019s personal history is not dissimilar to Trump\u2019s, a bottomless well of scandal that, over time, has immunized people against its real-world consequences.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, brutal new reporting from Vanity Fair, reveals disturbing details about RFK Jr., completely upending his claims of being the most transparent candidate in history and a moral authority. The endless list of RFK Jr.\u2019s dangerous and grotesque behavior casts doubts on his fitness for office. As one friend put it, RFK Jr.\u2019s campaign could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":263,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1036810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-release"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Vanity Fair: RFK Jr. Could be \u201cOne of the Greatest Villains in American History - Democrats<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/vanity-fair-rfk-jr-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-villains-in-american-history\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Democrats\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-07-03T14:45:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-07-03T14:45:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Claire DePree\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Claire DePree\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/vanity-fair-rfk-jr-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-villains-in-american-history\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/vanity-fair-rfk-jr-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-villains-in-american-history\/\",\"name\":\"Vanity Fair: RFK Jr. Could be \u201cOne of the Greatest Villains in American History - 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