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RFK Jr. calls report claiming he sexually abused his children’s nanny – and ate a dog – a ‘load of garbage’

Theo

Top line

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has denied an explosive report in Vanity Fair magazine that accused him of sexually harassing a woman he hired to babysit his children in the late 1990s and of once eating grilled dog meat. However, the controversial candidate, whose influence on the close 2024 presidential race is being closely watched, has remained silent on many details of the story.

Key data

In an interview on the YouTube podcast “Breaking Points,” Kennedy dismissed the Vanity Fair profile of him as “rubbish,” but refused to specifically address the allegation that he groped Eliza Cooney, a woman he hired as a babysitter and assistant in the 1990s.

According to the article, which cites interviews with Cooney and excerpts from a diary she kept at the time, Cooney was a 23-year-old recent college graduate when she was hired as a part-time babysitter to watch Kennedy’s children and assist him in his environmental law clinic at Pace University.

Cooney claims that Kennedy once grabbed her leg under the table during a meeting in his family’s kitchen, groped her on at least one other occasion, rummaged through her diary, and showed up shirtless in her bedroom and asked her to rub lotion on her back.

Kennedy told the interviewer he was not a “church boy” and had a “very wild youth” before adding, “I have so many skeletons in the closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

Kennedy accused Variety of “reusing 30-year-old stories,” but when pressed to respond directly to the harassment allegations, he said, “I’m not going to comment on that.”

Forbes has asked Kennedy’s campaign team for a comment.

tangent

Vanity Fair also published a photo of him holding what the magazine described as “the grilled remains of something that looks like a dog” to his open mouth. Citing a veterinarian, the article said the animal Kennedy was believed to have eaten was a dog, but the presidential candidate claimed in the Breaking Points interview that the photo showed him “eating a goat in Patagonia.” The Vanity Fair report noted that, according to metadata embedded in the image file, the photo was taken in 2010, the same year Kennedy was diagnosed with a tapeworm in his brain.

Key quote

In an interview with Chris Cuomo on News Nation on Tuesday night, Kennedy again denied the dog meat allegations and described himself as an “adventurous eater” who eats “practically anything.” But the independent candidate said he draws the line at three things: “I wouldn’t eat a human, I wouldn’t eat a monkey and I wouldn’t eat a dog. I think I would eat anything else.”

Important background

After a brief run for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy ran as an independent candidate in the 2024 general election. He is widely believed to have no chance of an outright win, but in a razor-thin race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the low double-digit numbers Kennedy has been polling in some polls could narrow either Biden’s or Trump’s lead.

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