RFK Jr. je duboko problematičan čovjek, sa gomilom ličnih problema i demona. Po tom pitanju je gotovo rame uz rame sa Trumpom.
Long before he entered the 2024 race with a wagon train of conspiracy theories, the wider Kennedy family was intimately familiar with RFK Jr.’s problematic personality—the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise, the “savior complex” (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his “pathological need for attention.”
The portrait family members paint of Bobby is of a man of exceptional charm, wit, brains, and generosity who has championed important environmental causes, but whose worst traits—an unnerving ease with blending fact and fiction; a powerful ability to deny the collateral damage of his own destructive actions—have engulfed his better angels. The source of these pathologies, they observe, are found in his long and troubling biography, a life story marked by personal trauma and addiction to drugs, sex, and, perhaps most perniciously of all, public adulation.
“You can’t reason with addiction,” says Stephen Kennedy Smith, a cousin of Kennedy’s whose father ran the elder Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. “And what we know about addiction is it leads to bad judgment—extremely bad judgment.”
Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what he suggested to the friend was a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain.
The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness, simultaneously mocking Korean culture, reveling in animal cruelty, and needlessly risking his reputation and that of his family.
Though he has not responded to Vanity Fair, after this story was published Kennedy said publicly that the picture is of a goat, in Patagonia, contrary to what he texted his friend. (He has also deployed a “G.O.A.T.” meme.) The friend says that Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul, so he was certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat. In any case, it’s grotesque.”
When Kennedy was married to his second wife, Mary Richardson, he was known to text other damning images to friends as well—of nude women. Those friends assumed Kennedy himself had taken the pictures, but they didn’t know whether the subjects had consented to having their genitalia photographed, let alone shared with other people. When one friend lost his phone, he panicked that somebody might discover the images.
Theories about Kennedy’s reckless behaviors abound. Long before it was reported, members of the family knew about the brain worm, which in court testimonies Kennedy conjectured he’d picked up from food he ate in South Asia. He said the tapeworm consumed a portion of his brain and led to protracted “brain fog.” But more often his family points to Kennedy’s 14 years as a heroin user, which began when Kennedy was 15 and didn’t end until he was 29. Kennedy has made his history of addiction part of his campaign narrative, arguing that he is more equipped to fix America’s addiction problem. Critics in his family feel otherwise. One Kennedy has circulated a report from the National Institutes of Health on the impact of long-term heroin abuse, which surmises that the damage can alter the physiology of the brain, “creating long-term imbalances in neuronal and hormonal systems that are not easily reversed” and “which may affect decision-making abilities, the ability to regulate behavior, and responses to stressful situations.”
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, regularly shooting up with his troubled brother David Kennedy, according to multiple friends from the era. Addiction shadowed RFK Jr. and his entourage, including his best friend Chris Bartle, through college and law school and into his early professional life working in the Manhattan DA’s office.
On one level, Kennedy’s substance abuse was comprehensible. He had seen his own father murdered on the public stage, a traumatic event that altered history, haunted his family, and deepened the weight of expectation on young Bobby, who was 14 at the time. Of all Bobby Sr.’s children, the namesake son was considered the most promising dynastic heir. Square jawed and twinkly eyed, he looked and sounded the most like his father, with the charisma and public profile to take up the mantle if he chose. His college roommate Peter Kaplan, the acclaimed editor of The New York Observer who died in 2013, once noted Bobby’s “almost frightening facility with language.” By birthright and training Kennedy was presidential timber, with family friends like Robert Coles, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard, and Lem Billings, a close friend of John F. Kennedy’s, expending considerable effort trying to mentor and tutor him after his father’s death. “Jack [Kennedy] was lucky,” Billings once said. “He didn’t have a lot of Kennedys getting there before him. Everywhere a boy like Bobby looks, there are footprints, all of them deeper than his own.”
“Bobby,” David Kennedy once told a pair of family biographers, “was our last illusion.” Not long after the book was excerpted, David died of an overdose, at age 28.
Many tried and failed to get him off heroin. Instead of guiding him to greater glory, Billings followed Bobby into heroin addiction. Meantime, Kennedy looked for heroes outside the family bubble, befriending Roger Ailes, the late Fox News founder who at the time was an independent TV producer and adviser to Richard Nixon. In 1972, when RFK Jr. was 18, Ailes took Kennedy to Kenya to shoot a wildlife documentary in which Kennedy appeared shirtless and running from a rhinoceros.
Family lore had it that Kennedy, while attending Harvard, once leapt the gap between two six-story buildings. He kept an owl in his house and carried a live snake around campus. Because of the drug taking and risky behavior, Bobby was often at odds with his mother Ethel, who regularly threw him out of the house. Jackie Kennedy Onassis forbade her own children, John and Caroline, from fraternizing with him and his brothers. “Like all the rest of us, Bobby grew up feeling that being a Kennedy you could do virtually anything you wanted,” Kennedy’s cousin Chris Lawford told the authors of The Kennedys: An American Drama, a controversial 1984 book. “It was good because you got away with things other people wouldn’t dream of; it was bad because it destroyed your sense of what was worth doing.”
One of the authors (the other died in 2019) could attest to that: David Horowitz remembers Bobby being so cavalier that he cut lines of cocaine for his brother Michael Kennedy and allowed him to snort a line in front of the writer—and only then did he introduce Horowitz as a reporter. (Horowitz also recalls that Kennedy asked him for a ride to Harlem to score drugs.) In 1983 RFK Jr., by then an assistant DA in the office of Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, was discovered overdosing in the bathroom of an airplane.
When an excerpt of the Kennedy book was published in Playboy magazine in 1984, the family turned on David Kennedy for airing the family’s addiction secrets, and he stayed in a separate hotel during a family gathering in Palm Beach. “Bobby,” David had told the book’s authors, “was our last illusion.”
The next day David died of an overdose at age 28.
After Kennedy was arrested for possession of heroin, his cousin Michael Skakel, also a recovering addict, supported him through recovery, which Kennedy said brought them close together. He would say he knew Skakel “as well as one person can know another.”
Skakel later became the chief suspect in the 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, having confessed to private investigators in the mid-1990s that on the night of the murder, he had climbed a tree near Moxley’s bedroom window and masturbated. She was found the next day beaten and stabbed to death with a broken golf club. Though he was not initially a suspect, Skakel had also intimated to boarding school friends that he had committed the murder.
By the late 1990s Kennedy had found his calling as an environmental lawyer, running the nonprofit Riverkeeper, starting an environmental law firm, and leading the charge against corporate polluters, pressuring General Electric to spend $1.7 billion to clean up PCBs the company had dumped into the Hudson River. He regularly attended AA meetings, a model of recovery and renewed purpose.
The other Kennedy men of his generation, however, were busy blowing up the family’s legacy. Cousin William Kennedy Smith was tried for and acquitted of rape in a highly publicized 1991 trial; brother Michael Kennedy’s relationship with an underage babysitter was exposed before he died in a skiing accident in Aspen in 1997; older brother Joseph II bowed out of a race for governor of Massachusetts after his ex-wife wrote a damaging tell-all in 1997; and then cousin John F. Kennedy Jr., who was considered the quintessential Kennedy of his generation, died in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999.
When Greenwich authorities reopened the Moxley murder case in 1998 and later charged Skakel, the Kennedy family publicly distanced themselves from Skakel, who had previously worked as a driver for cousin Michael Kennedy, then running his brother Joseph Kennedy II’s power company, Citizens Energy, while Joseph ran for governor of Massachusetts. People believed an angry Skakel leaked the story of Michael Kennedy and the babysitter to the Boston Globe, which blew up Michael Kennedy’s career and marriage. (Skakel’s lawyer did not respond to Vanity Fair’s questions for this story.) The same year, Skakel circulated a book proposal to New York publishers for a memoir titled Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean, which promised to “lay bare the devious workings of a propaganda machine that works night and day to hide the sordid truth behind a scrim of patriotic idealism, hero worship, and religiosity.” The Kennedy family, he claimed, had accused him of trying to extort money from them. Skakel painted a portrait of Bobby and his brothers as rutting satyrs, and alleged that Michael Kennedy had a “three-way tryst with his secretary and his brother Bobby’s wife.”
Kennedy and Emily Ruth Black with their children Kathleen Alexandra and RFK III at the 1991 premiere of The Addams Family.
“NORMAL IS AN ILLUSION” Kennedy and Emily Ruth Black with their children, Kathleen Alexandra and RFK III, at the 1991 premiere of The Addams Family.Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images.
When Skakel went on trial for murder in 2002, RFK Jr. blamed Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne for helping reopen the Moxley case by publishing a thinly veiled fictional account of the murder, in 1993, called A Season in Purgatory, which seemed to implicate a Skakel family member. Around the same time, Skakel’s father hired a private investigation firm; their report, later acquired by Dunne, cast suspicion on Michael Skakel.
Dunne and Kennedy engaged in a heated public feud over the facts of the case, trading volleys in published articles, including Kennedy’s 14,000-word defense of Skakel in The Atlantic magazine. In an interview at the time, Kennedy accused Dunne of twisting the facts and using suggestive language to make his arguments appear more credible.
He’s very clever about the way he does it. If you look at how he couches his accusations, it’s always “somebody told me this.” “An anonymous source said this.” So he’s not saying it’s true, but the average reader misses that nuance. For some reason, the voice of this pathetic creature has been amplified by the willingness of talk-show hosts to allow him on to spout this stuff, and by his publishers, who publish stuff without fact-checking.
Bobby was the only Kennedy to defend Skakel, showing up twice to the Connecticut courtroom. Theories abound about why Kennedy felt compelled to defend Skakel, including speculation that Skakel was blackmailing him. According to one of Kennedy’s diaries, obtained by the New York Post, he thought that his cousin was “delusional and paranoid” even as he publicly maintained that Skakel was innocent of the murder.
For his part Dunne drew a pointed conclusion from Kennedy’s defense: “If you were to take Kennedy’s word that he knows his cousin as much as any human being alive,” he wrote, “and you believe Skakel murdered a girl at 15, the concluding logic isn’t so great for Bobby.”
Skakel had served 11 years of a 20-year sentence when, after years of appeals arguing that his lawyer had botched the defense, the conviction was vacated and Skakel was released pending a retrial (prosecutors opted not to bring it again). In 2016 Kennedy published a book defending Skakel called Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit. Kennedy pinned the murder of Martha Moxley on two teenagers from New York City, one black, the other multiracial, whom investigators had already discounted. Ghostwritten by reporter Andrew Goldman and published by Skyhorse Publishing, which also issues Kennedy’s anti-vaccine books, Kennedy’s book claimed to have solved the murder.
“I am dead certain they did it,” Kennedy told The New York Times. (Both men have denied committing the murder.)
Asked about Kennedy’s conclusions, Martha Moxley’s mother, Dorthy, said she had “never seen the truth so twisted and manipulated in my entire life.”
Kennedy conceded that his claims were “controversial.” “Anytime you do anything controversial, you lose constituents,” he told the Times. “You lose support because people have opinions.”
The book, hyped by Alan Dershowitz (also a Skyhorse author) and Bill O’Reilly, further buttressed Kennedy’s identity as a serial white knight jousting with the prevailing establishment, whether the justice system, corporate polluters, or the pharmaceutical industry—or later, President Biden, the Democratic National Committee, and his own family.
