Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has responded to allegations of sexual assault made by a former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, by stating, “I am not a church boy.” The independent presidential candidate, who poses a potential threat to both the Biden and Trump campaigns, made this statement following Cooney’s claims in a Vanity Fair article that Kennedy assaulted her at his home in 1998.
Eliza Cooney, who worked as a live-in nanny for Kennedy and his then-wife at their home in Mount Kisco, New York, recounted that Kennedy touched her leg during a business meeting and later appeared shirtless in her bedroom, asking her to rub lotion on his back. Cooney also alleged that a few months later, Kennedy blocked her in the kitchen and began groping her. She described feeling “frozen” and “shocked” during the incident, which was interrupted when a male worker entered the kitchen.
When asked about the allegations on the Breaking Points podcast, Kennedy dismissed the Vanity Fair article as “a lot of garbage.” He stated, “Listen, I have said this from the beginning. I am not a church boy. I am not running like that. I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”
Kennedy accused Vanity Fair of recycling old stories and declined to comment on the specifics of Cooney’s allegations. “I’m not going to comment on it,” he said. The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Guardian.
Cooney, now 48, said she kept the alleged assault secret until the #MeToo movement prompted many women to come forward with their stories of abuse in 2017. She confided in her mother and, after Kennedy announced his presidential campaign in 2023, she told two friends and a lawyer, Elizabeth Geddes. Geddes did not respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy, 70, initially ran against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination before launching a campaign as an independent in October of last year. As the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. senator for New York who was assassinated in 1968, and the nephew of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated while serving as president in 1963, Kennedy’s campaign has drawn widespread attention but has been marred by controversies.
In July 2023, a video surfaced of Kennedy making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack Black people and white people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy has also claimed that Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain” and linked antidepressants to school shootings. In 2023, he claimed that chemicals in water are making children transgender.
Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, is polling at 9.1% of the national vote, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average, and is highly unlikely to win the presidency. However, both the Biden and Trump campaigns fear he could pull votes away from them in key states. Kennedy will be on the ballot in Michigan, a crucial swing state that the president won by 150,000 votes in 2020, and is working to gain ballot access in Wisconsin, which Biden won by 20,000 votes.
In a separate part of the Vanity Fair investigation, Kennedy was accused of posing with a picture of a barbecued dog. Kennedy explained that the photo was actually of him eating a goat in Patagonia, not Korea, as Vanity Fair had reported. He criticized the magazine’s reporting as “garbage pail journalism” and accused them of joining the ranks of supermarket tabloids.
“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 on X, formerly Twitter. “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.”
Kennedy has also been open about his controversial positions and the public disapproval from many of his famous family members. He recently stated that he stood by his many controversial positions and downplayed the disapproval. “I am in a position that no independent has been in history,” he said, insisting that in a head-to-head race, he would beat Donald Trump and vanquish Joe Biden by a “landslide.”
The Independent has reached out to Kennedy’s campaign for comment.
Source: The Guardian, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, The Independent, BBC
