Damning Report Reveals RFK Jr.’s History of Alleged Sexual Assault

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allegedly sexually assaulted a babysitter more than two decades ago, according to an exclusive story from Vanity Fair.

In 1998, Kennedy and his second wife, Mary Richardson, hired a 23-year-old babysitter named Eliza Cooney, who moved into their family home to watch their four children. Kennedy’s inappropriate behavior toward Cooney began one night in 1998, when he started rubbing his hand up and down her thigh under the kitchen table. Cooney wrote in her diary that she wasn’t sure whether “he was on something or really tired or was missing Mary or was testing me.”

Kennedy later appeared in her bedroom, perusing the intimate details of her life in her diary, and asked her to rub his back with lotion, an incident that she told Vanity Fair was “totally inappropriate.”

In another instance, he came up behind her as she searched for something in the pantry, and began groping her hips, rib cage, and chest, and didn’t stop until interrupted by another staff member. “My back was to the door of the pantry, and he came up behind me,” said Cooney. “I was frozen. Shocked.”

Cooney left the family a few months later, writing in her diary that she wanted to leave “bad men” behind in 1999. She kept the alleged sexual assault a secret until 2017, when she finally told her mother.

In 2023, when Kennedy announced he was running against Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden, Cooney opted not to file a civil suit against her former boss, but ultimately decided to take her story public regardless.

According to several people close to the family, this was far from Kennedy’s only marital indiscretion, but it marks a trend of sexually aggressive behavior by the struggling presidential candidate. A former friend of Richardson’s told Vanity Fair that Richardson called Kennedy a “sex addict” and said he was taking medication for it. The two divorced in 2010 when Kennedy began a relationship with actress Cheryl Hines. Hines and Kennedy married in 2014.

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to Vanity Fair’s requests for comment.

According to the report, Kennedy’s alleged sexual deviancy doesn’t end there. When he was still married to Richardson, he sent his friends nude photographs of women on several occasions. His friends told Vanity Fair that they believed he had taken the pictures himself, although they weren’t sure the women had consented to being photographed or having the images passed on.

In another strange texting incident, last year, Kennedy sent his friend a photo of him on vacation in Korea, holding up and pretending to eat the barbecued carcass of a dog. The picture’s metadata indicated that the photograph was taken in 2010, the same year that Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain worm, which he claims is responsible for his brain fog.

Kennedy’s reckless texting habits seemed to stump many of his friends, who knew he had political aspirations and a desire to protect his family’s name. It seems that neither of these goals could rein in the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, convinced that he could do whatever he wanted and get away with it.

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to take up a challenge to Illinois’s ban on assault weapons, though not every justice on the high court agreed with the decision to do so.

In a separate opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas appeared keen to uproot future bans, urging the court to take up another such case on the basis that some semiautomatic guns, such as the AR-15, are among the most popular weapons in the nation, thereby claiming that more guidance is needed to delineate which weapons are “dangerous” and “unusual.” He further called the Seventh Circuit’s decision to uphold the state ban, which stemmed from a landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision that ruled that military grade weapons such as M-16 rifles are not protected under the Second Amendment, as “nonsensical.”

“The Seventh Circuit’s contrived ‘non-militaristic’ limitation on the Arms protected by the Second Amendment seems unmoored from both text and history,” Thomas wrote. “It is difficult to see how the Seventh Circuit could have concluded that the most widely owned semiautomatic rifles are not ‘Arms’ protected by the Second Amendment.”

The Illinois ban was instituted after a 2022 Independence Day parade shooting in Chicago’s Highland Park took the lives of seven people and injured 48 others. The law prohibits the sale of semiautomatic “assault weapons,” which are commonly used in mass shootings, including the AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, as well as the sale of some handguns. The ban also forbids the sale of magazines that use more than 10 rounds for long weapons, or 15 rounds for handguns, as well as rapid-fire devices known as “switches” that convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic machine guns.

“This assault weapons ban is a step in the right direction,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said at a press conference following the law’s passage. “But there’s no magic fix, no single law that will end gun violence once and for all. So we must keep fighting, voting, and protesting to ensure that future generations will only have to read about massacres like Highland Park, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde in their history books. It’s our burden and our mandate, one that we carry with solemn honor for our children who will grow up in a better and safer world.”

This is not the first time this term that Thomas has sought to dramatically expand access to deadly weapons. Last month, he joined the majority decision to overturn a federal ban on bump stocks and dissented from a ruling barring domestic abusers from owning guns.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it is sending a whopping nine cases back to the lower courts after its ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the first sign of the chaos from overturning the Chevron deference.

The court ruled Friday to upend Chevron, a 40-year-old doctrine that requires judges to defer to a federal agency when determining the meaning of any ambiguous laws that agency should try to enforce. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that, instead, “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.”

The decision in Loper Bright now allows the federal judiciary to play pretend as scientists and policymakers, while stripping the administrative agencies that are staffed by experts who get their directives from democratically elected officials with the power to determine policy. As a result, several cases with questions about ambiguous language are now headed back to the lower courts.

For example, of the cases that have been remanded back to the appeals courts, there are four cases that have to do with the interpretation of ambiguous language in the Immigration and Nationality Act—a law enforced by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Biden-appointed Homeland Security Secretary Alejando Mayorkas.

Now the question will no longer be referred to immigration experts at the department, or to policymakers representing the current administration, but left to the discretion of appeals judges in the Fourth, Ninth and Eleventh Circuits.

Other questions sent back to the lower courts have to do with energy, agriculture, labor practices, and the Internal Revenue Service to name a few.

In the wake of Loper Bright, right-wing judges—who have pushed for years to oppose Chevron and embrace deregulation—have the functional ability to veto any new federal regulation they decide is too “ambiguous.” As these cases continue to pile up, which they no doubt will, the law will no longer be determined by Congress, or even the executive branch, but by injunction.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity means that the president can attempt to overturn elections, according to one of Trump’s lawyers.

Will Scharf told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Monday night that “alternate slates of electors have been a method used by previous presidents, most notably Ulysses S. Grant, to ensure the integrity of prior elections.”

“We believe the assembly of those alternate slates of electors was an official act of the presidency,” Scharf said, referring to the attempts by Trump allies to subvert the 2020 election results in different states. “That’s what we argued before the Supreme Court.”

After the 2020 election, Trump and his allies tried to present fake electors in states across America to flip results in his favor, including Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona, resulting in criminal charges in many cases. In Georgia, Trump himself was charged, along with 18 of his allies, but the case is in limbo while an appeals court considers whether prosecutor Fani Willis should be thrown off of the case.

The nation’s highest court seems to have opened the floodgates for any kind of presidential crimes, so long as the president can argue it was an “official” act. Now, sitting presidents can argue they cannot be prosecuted, evidence cannot be collected against them, and the Justice Department is not independent of the White House. There are probably more devastating interpretations yet to come. Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to get his hush-money conviction thrown out over how some of the evidence was collected.

The work to undo Donald Trump’s criminal charges—and his recent conviction—in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity has already begun.

Hours after the ruling Monday, the former president’s legal team requested that Judge Juan Merchan set aside Trump’s hush-money conviction and delay the sentencing scheduled for next week, citing the Supreme Court’s expansion of presidential immunity.

Trump’s attorneys argued that some evidence presented in the case constituted official presidential acts, according to a copy of a letter obtained by the Associated Press. That could refer to some of the communication Trump had about his former fixer Michael Cohen, which his legal team had previously attempted to redact from the trial on the same presidential immunity claim. But that was before the Supreme Court expanded the definition of immunity.

“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” read the consequential ruling. “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”

The high court’s decision already effectively killed Trump’s federal election interference trial, which sought to hold Trump accountable for his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results and the far-right mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6. Now it could overturn one of the few cases where Trump is being held accountable.

Trump was accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He was convicted on 34 felony charges in May for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. Merchan could sentence Trump to up to four years in prison on the charges. He could also impose probation, supervised release, or order Trump to do community service or pay fines.