Finally: a dedicated, concise report on RFK Jr’s sordid history with women, with all the sources.
Why?
Because now one of the allegations involves a criminal act.
And because it’s becoming clearer that the emotional manipulation he allegedly deploys in his personal life—many sources say that “love-bombing” is his technique—rhymes so closely with his political day-to-day that it’s hard to find the lines between stumping, white knighting, seducing, and screwing.
Correction: The RFK Jr clip “I’m not a church boy” ran on Breaking Points, not Majority Report.
Show Notes
The real victims of Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr are other female journalists | Moira Donegan | The Guardian
Exclusive: Multiple Women Claiming Romantic Relationships With RFK Jr. Threaten His Standing in Trump Orbit
RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets. | Vanity Fair
Damning Report Reveals RFK Jr.’s History of Alleged Sexual Assault | The New Republic
RFK Jr. Was a Compulsive Womanizer, and Yes, We Should Care | The New Republic
43 suspected mistresses found in RFK Jr.’s phone
Former babysitter for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accuses him of sexual assault in Vanity Fair profile
Woman who accused RFK Jr of sexual assault says he apologized by text | Reuters
Keith Edwards — “I’m not a church boy.”
Massachusetts Sexual Assault Laws
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Texts Apology to Woman Who Says He Sexually Assaulted Her
A Timeline of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Controversies
The Last Days of Mary Kennedy: 'She Is Angry and Depressed, but She Is Not Ill' (Exclusive)
AA meetings in the White House? Kennedy, a recovering addict, says it's just one of changes he'd make
RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government “Wellness Farms” – Mother Jones
Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign — Conspirituality
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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This is a brief called, I think?
C. A key source for a major part of this story is the New York Post.
I'll say more about that in a bit.
And D, it's never easy to walk the line of relevance in this territory, because somehow you have to cut a path
between the salacious and the puritanical.
It's good to avoid stigmatizing non-monogamy.
It's good to avoid the slut-shaming of women like journalist Olivia Nuzzi caught sexting with Bobby.
It's good to respect the choices of consenting partners while also assessing what consent means
in the context of power differentials.
And you also have to step around the landmines scattered by right-wing dipshits
who over the past five years have revisioned the Me Too movement as a Stalinist purge
or who are ready to cry cancel culture whenever they stub their toes.
Or we also have the burgeoning Christian influencer movement standing by to launder, I guess I mean baptize, serial abusers like Russell Brand into their ranks under the guise of forgiveness and renewal.
But putting all that aside, now is the time because three things are much more clear at this point.
Firstly, there's now a criminal aspect to one of the allegations against Bobby.
Secondly, Reportedly, the Trump campaign is concerned, ironically, that the now constant drip of Bobby sexual misconduct stories will negatively impact their candidate.
Now, I hope they're right, and I'm doing my part.
But thirdly, and most importantly...
It's now also clear that the emotional manipulation alleged in his personal life, many sources say that love bombing is his technique, rhymes so closely with his political day-to-day that it's hard to find the line between stumping, white knighting, seducing, and screwing.
Now, to underline the criminal aspect, back in July, Joe Hagan in Vanity Fair got Eliza Cooney, now 48, on record, alleging that Bobby sexually assaulted her repeatedly in 1998.
She was in her early 20s, and she worked for Bobby and his second wife, Mary Richardson, as a nanny in the Hyannisport, Massachusetts, Kennedy compound.
Now, Bobby, perhaps through his own deep state connections, found Cooney's present mobile number
after the story dropped and texted her to vaguely apologize for something.
He wrote, I read your description of an episode
in which I touched you in an unwanted manner.
I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did
that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did that offended you or hurt your feelings.
So no memory of the incident, and Cooney was pretty disgusted by the texts.
And then on air, Bobby didn't deny the reports, and in fact alluded to the possibility of more stories coming out.
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.
So, you know, this Vanity Fair is recent.
Recycling 30-year-old stories, and I'm not going to comment on the details of any of them, but I am who I am.
You're talking there about the nanny situation.
I mean, I do have to ask her.
I mean, are you denying it or not?
I'll just note that it's a pretty bad move on the part of the majority report host there to call it the nanny situation instead of, so you're referring to Eliza Cooney accusing you of multiple sexual assaults while working for you in 1998.
So that's just a touch of rape culture in journalism there.
But let's note that Bobby is all but admitting to sexual assault here and referencing rambunctious behavior when really the topic is an alleged criminal offense in the state of Massachusetts that carries a maximum penalty of five years in state prison and mandatory sex offender registration.
And now, this week, yet another story comes out, not about assault, but about his serial womanizing.
This time, mediaite reporting that three more women, all connected to Bobby's anti-vax juggernaut children's health defense, have come forward to talk about being romantically involved with him over the past year of campaigning.
And this follows on the heels of news of his digital affair with New York magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi, again while campaigning.
This is the guy who spends all of his time complaining about the mainstream media, maybe because so few of them will sext him back.
So those are two of the main focal points for looking at this from my point of view, because they both involve blurred boundaries.
The Cooney testimony tells us that the line between promiscuity and assault may not be that clear for Bobby, and the campaign affairs tell us that Bobby really is a good match for Trump in the sense that there really is no difference between politicking and pleasure-seeking and ego aggrandizement.
And to underline just how far back that second piece goes, I've got a quote from an interview that Jerry Oppenheimer did with journalist David Horowitz in 2013 for his 2015 book, RFK Jr., The Dark Side of the Dream.
Horowitz, until the mid-70s to late-70s, was a proponent of new-left politics, and then took a rightward turn in the early 80s, around the time that he was contracted, along with conservative author Peter Collier, to write a big book about the Kennedy dynasty, which was eventually published in 1984.
That involved spending a lot of time with Bobby, including on the campaign trail with him through the South
in support of his uncle Ted's bid for the Democratic nomination for president.
Here's Oppenheimer quoting Horowitz, and I want to apologize here
for the outdated and sexist language.
Quote, On a three-day swing with Bobby through Tuskegee, Birmingham and Huntsville, recalled Horowitz.
Bobby had a girl in every place.
There were women there like moths to the flame.
I just know that he was fucking everything in sight, even though he was involved with Emily Black, who was just very quiet, just seemed like a nice person.
I'll interject here to say that Emily Black eventually became RFK Jr.'s first wife.
By the end of the day, the rest of us were exhausted, and Bobby was ill, had the flu or something, and all of us collapsed, but there was a girl waiting for him.
I was younger then, and I'm a healthy male, but I wouldn't have wanted to just go to bed with a strange woman.
What is another fuck gonna do for you?
It was just insanity, compulsive, nutty with him.
Maybe in his mind he was building his heroic myth.
He certainly couldn't have been getting a lot of pleasure when he was running an over 100 fever and looked really ill and was hoarse.
He had one girl who was a campaign worker, so he always had that one.
At one campaign event, he just went off to screw her.
Okay, so that is 1980.
And that is in year 11 out of 14 years of Bobby's heroin addiction, which started shortly after the murder of his father.
In 1983, he gets busted for possession of heroin in North Dakota and checks himself into rehab.
So, even though sex addiction is a contested diagnosis in the addiction literature, it's not in the DSM, mainly because there are disagreements about whether it alters brain chemistry in the same way that external substances can, it's hard to see this behavior separately from the substance use issue that is central to his prodigal son storyline, in which surrendering to God through daily AA meetings has changed everything for him and kept him on the straight and narrow.
This version of his recovery narrative is so important to him that back in June of this year, he was fantasizing that once in the White House, he would be hosting AA meetings in the West Wing.
And he's also proposing establishing wellness farms for youth who are recovering from drug addiction, where gardening and clean living will replace medication.
Now, if Bobby's apparent need for constant sexual attention has parallels with his history of drug addiction, he wants you to know all about the latter, but not about the former.
Because in his 2018 autobiography, American Values, Lessons I Learned from My Family, Bobby is very open about his substance issues, but he says next to nothing about the sexual behaviors that by 2018 were well known.
And there is a term for this.
It is strategic transparency.
And it comes from my friend, Dr.
Anne Glague, who studies how religious communities respond to abuse allegations.
And she has found that accused leaders will often admit to only a portion, and the most forgivable portion at that, of their misconduct.
And they'll do so in order to show their followers that they can be self-reflective and contrite.
But the main purpose of seeking forgiveness for one action can be to draw attention away from other actions or to lead followers to believe that the truth is fully known, fully out there.
There's nothing more to discover.
Now, I want to add a few comments here, as I said before, about the sources for these stories.
After the publication of Oppenheimer's book, RFK Jr.
issued a statement on his website denouncing it as a, quote, fictional inventory of unsubstantiated rumors and outright invention, unquote.
But he did not provide specific rebuttals to any specific claims.
He complained that Oppenheimer hadn't interviewed him or friends or family members, and he dismissed the book as sensationalistic.
But crucially, the big lawyer did not claim defamation or take any legal action against the author or publisher.
And that's been the pattern, because at most, Bobby will rail against what he calls recycled sensationalist stories, but he'll never directly contradict the data points.
And that includes, most famously, his lack of denial over the 2013 publication of excerpts from his infidelity diaries by the New York Post.
And in those diaries, he recounted affairs with 37 women in 2001 alone amidst expressions of Catholic guilt over what he called his, quote, lust demons, unquote.
The following year, the New York Post published details from contact lists downloaded from RFK Jr.'s mobile phone by his distraught wife at the time, Mary Richardson.
There were 43 contacts that Richardson believed were mistresses.
Now, for those who rightly question the integrity of the New York Post, Nina Burley points out in the New Republic that the reporter who broke the diary story, Canadian Isabel Vincent, is a hardcore investigative journalist who covered the Medellin cartel as South American bureau chief for Canada's Globe and Mail.
She's the author of seven nonfiction books.
She has bylines in every major paper in the English-speaking world.
She's a legit journalist.
And she got hold of the diaries through the family of Mary Richardson, who died by suicide in 2012.
Her family alleged that she'd been driven to alcohol abuse and despair by RFK Jr.'s compulsive affairs.
But getting back to 1980, according to Horowitz, Bobby is fucking his way across the South, while Uncle Ted, himself a famous womanizer, is challenging Jimmy Carter from the labor left, painting a vision of a more equitable future.
It's a very Kennedy scene with old roots that by now are very familiar.
But the sheer compulsiveness that Horowitz describes from 1980 maps neatly onto Isabel Vincent's reporting almost 35 years later, which also ties Kennedy's endless traveling roadshow as much to chasing sex as to trumpeting his ideals.
In the 2014 article about his mobile phone contacts gathered during his environmental activism days, Vincent writes, quote, We're good to go.
One woman had the notation airplane after her name, another farm, and another teacher.
One was cryptically known as Z. Richardson believed her philandering husband also used aliases to hide his own identity when traveling.
Robert Strong was a favorite pseudonym, she told her friend.
So, we have about 12 years of reporting on this.
RFK Jr. almost has his own verse in the Leonard Cohen song, Everybody Knows.
But there's one new element in this recent swirl of reports and commentary, and that's an update on what older reporters might have left at notions of charisma and charm when it came to explaining the Kennedy ability to attract and use women.
And that's the emergence of a different term.
In reports about Bobby's alleged affairs over this past year, friends of Olivia Nuzzi and sources close to the three women who spoke to Mediaite used the term love-bombing to describe his strategy.
Now, I have the sense that as this word has been popularized, it's become as fuzzy as gaslighting in common usage, but it does have very specific roots in the unification church in which it was used to describe an overt recruitment technique.
In her 1996 book, Cults in Our Midst, psychologist Margaret Singer popularized the negative analysis of the term in writing, quote, as soon as any interest is shown by the recruits, they may be love bombed by the recruiter or other cult members.
Love bombing is a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership and Love-bombing, or the offer of instant companionship, is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruitment drives, unquote.
Now, regular listeners will know that cultic influence in spiritual and wellness communities is our wheelhouse.
Charisma, promising salvation, and locking in an in-group mentality are core to the social organization of the groups that we follow.
And the most successful leaders are those who can emotionally overwhelm their followers.
And if you specifically listened to my earlier report on RFK Jr.
called The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr.'s Campaign, I'll post the link to that along with all other sources in the notes, you'll know that the entire basis of Bobby's New Age, all-natural health, spiritually incontinent support is a loose network of charismatic communities.
And the discourse that those communities carry and foment is swimming in maudlin, over-the-top professions of love and oneness and awestruck feel-feels of beauty.
A core of RFK Jr.'s support is coming from people who find it very easy to visualize him as some kind of compassionate deity from beyond time and space who has come to sacrifice everything to make the world right again.
This is not an exaggeration.
And we know that he is extremely skillful at locking that attention in.
We can hear it happen when he sermonizes all the podcast bros with his memorized collection of transcendent riffs about the forests and ponds of Virginia, the joys of falconry, and his love for St.
Francis of Assisi. You can watch the bros melt right in front of you with all their TRT leaking out like wax onto the floor.
Aubrey Marcus reads him love poems and weeps.
Charles Eisenstein imagines that Bobby's going to repair the American timeline broken with the 1960s assassinations through quantum magic.
He's going to run the Zapruder film in reverse.
And Tucker Carlson gets misty-eyed at his speechifying about rivers and mountains.
And Lex Friedman goes into some kind of fugue state listening to Bobby talk about God's presence in every moment.
Now, we haven't heard the seduction rhapsodies he allegedly love bombs women with in private, but I'm willing to bet that they echo these public, borderline, homoerotic encounters.
And if the podcast bros and their audiences are feeling what I'm suggesting they're feeling, they might be even less likely to care at all about what he does with women.
In fact, it might even lift his star further with them.
So what's my point?
Is RFK Jr. a cult leader?
And if the three women who came forward to Mediaite came into contact with Kennedy through his anti-vaccine organization, and if we know that about 70% of the wellness world is female, and that Bobby himself says that he got started in the anti-vaccine world because women started showing up to his environmentalism talks during the same period in which he was keeping a body count travel diary...
I think we can say that for Bobby and his followers, it's very difficult to see the difference between promising national healing and personal love and failing at both.
Between pretending to be independent while kissing Trump's ass.
Between manipulating the emotions of a culture and the emotions of individuals.
Between screwing the body politic and screwing his political followers.
I think the only question those followers should be asking at this point is, if he love-bombed all those women into bed and then just left them all, is he doing that with us as he bounces from topic to topic, from platform to platform, from conspiracy theory to conspiracy theory, when he soothes our anxieties about our children, our medicines, our phones, the forever wars, and the state of nature?
Thanks for listening, everybody.
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