RFK Jr., accused of sexual abuse, says: “I am who I am”

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published an explosive article about independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that was full of shocking details, including allegations that he sexually abused a babysitter he employed. and that he may have eaten a dog.

According to a report by Vanity Fair (which was not confirmed by MSNBC), a woman named Eliza Cooney, who was hired as a babysitter for Kennedy’s children in 1998 when she was 23, claimed that he groped her or behaved inappropriately toward her three times. Cooney told the magazine that she wrote about the first incident in her diary at the time and confided in her mother in 2017 at the height of the #MeToo movement. She said she also told several of her friends about Kennedy’s alleged behavior last year after he announced his candidacy for president.

Kennedy did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the allegations, but in an interview on the YouTube show “Breaking Points,” he said he would not go into specifics, adding that he had a “wild youth.” (Kennedy was in his 40s when the incidents allegedly occurred.)

“Look, I’ve said this from the beginning: I’m not a church boy,” he told the interviewer on Tuesday. “I had a very, very wild youth. In my inaugural speech, I said that I – I have so many skeletons in the closet that if they all voted, I could run for king of the world.”

He said the magazine was “recycling 30-year-old stories,” adding, “I’m not going to comment on the specifics of it, but it’s – you know, I am who I am.” Asked point blank whether he denied Cooney’s allegations, Kennedy reiterated that he would not comment.

In recent months, a number of startling details about Kennedy’s past have come to light as his campaign tries to make an impression in the 2024 election. In May, The New York Times reported that in a deposition during his divorce from his second wife, he disclosed a series of medical problems, including that doctors had found a worm eating away at part of his brain.

In Tuesday’s interview, Kennedy not only denied the sexual harassment allegations, but also denied eating grilled dog. Vanity Fair reported that he sent his friend a photo last year that suggested he had tried dog meat. Kennedy told the friend, who was traveling to Asia, that he might like a restaurant in Korea that had dog meat on the menu.

“The picture they said was of me eating a dog is actually of me eating a goat,” he insisted, “in Patagonia.”