RFK Jr.’s family didn’t want him to run for office. Even they may not have known his darkest secrets.
For his part, Dunne drew a sharp conclusion from Kennedy’s defense: “If you take Kennedy at his word that he knew his cousin better than any human being alive,” he wrote, “and you believe that Skakel killed a girl at the age of 15, the logic of the conclusion is not very good for Bobby.”
Skakel had served 11 years of a 20-year sentence when, after years of appeals on the grounds that his defense attorney had botched the case, the conviction was overturned and Skakel was released pending a retrial (prosecutors decided not to retry the case). In 2016, Kennedy published a book defending Skakel called Framed: Why Michael Skakel spent more than a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Kennedy blamed Martha Moxley’s murder on two New York City teenagers, one black, the other multiracial, who investigators had ruled out. Written by reporter Andrew Goldman and published by Skyhorse Publishing, which also published Kennedy’s anti-vaccination book, Kennedy’s book claimed to have solved the murder.
“I’m sure they did,” Kennedy said. New York Times. (Both men denied committing the murder.)
Asked about Kennedy’s conclusions, Martha Moxley’s mother, Dorothy, said she had “never seen the truth so distorted and manipulated in my entire life.”
Kennedy acknowledged that his statements were “controversial.” “Anytime you do anything controversial, you lose voters,” he told Time. “You lose support because people have opinions.”
The book, heavily promoted by Alan Dershowitz (also the author of Skyhorse) and Bill O’Reilly, further cemented Kennedy’s identity as a white knight who consistently fought the establishment, whether it was the justice system, polluters, or the pharmaceutical industry—or later President Biden, the Democratic National Committee, and his family.
In 1994, Kennedy married Richardson, Kerry Kennedy’s best friend since they attended the Putney School in Vermont. She and Bobby had four children, Conor, Kyra, Aidan, and Finn. In the fall of 1998, the Kennedys hired a 23-year-old woman, Eliza Cooney, as a part-time babysitter. She was a recent college graduate interested in working for environmental causes and had been babysitting Kerry and Max’s children in Hyannis Port that summer. Cooney moved into Bobby and Mary’s family home in Mount Kisco, New York, caring for the children and assisting Bobby at his environmental law clinic at Pace University during the week.
One night, Cooney was sitting in the family kitchen with Kennedy and another young Riverkeeper volunteer named Murray Fisher to discuss work when she felt Kennedy’s hand moving up and down her leg under the table. She tried to make sense of the incident in her diary, which I have read. In an entry dated November 7, 1998, she wrote:
“In my heart, I hope it’s not the case,” said Cooney, now 48. (When contacted for comment, Fisher said he worked closely with Cooney and liked her, but was unaware of her alleged experiences with Kennedy at the time and felt bad for her.)
A few weeks later, she found Kennedy standing in her bedroom. She found her diary, which chronicled her daily activities and details of her romantic life with a boyfriend, open beside the bed. And she was shocked when a shirtless Kennedy, then 45, asked her to rub lotion on his back. “I thought, isn’t Mary home?” she recalled. “Isn’t she doing this for you?”
She did so reluctantly and quickly. “It was completely inappropriate,” she said, adding that she stopped recording these experiences in her diary for fear that Kennedy would read them.
A few months later, Cooney said, she was rummaging through the kitchen pantry for lunch after yoga class, still wearing a sports bra and leggings, when Kennedy came up behind her, blocked her in the room, and began groping her, placing his hands on her hips and running them along her ribcage and chest. “My back was to the pantry door, and he came up behind me,” she said, describing the alleged sexual assault. “I was numb. In shock.”
