Woman who accused RFK Jr of sexual assault says he apologized by text


Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr has apologized to a former family babysitter who accused him of sexual assault, the woman told Reuters on Friday.

In 1994 Kennedy married Richardson, who had been Kerry Kennedy’s best friend since they attended Putney School in Vermont together. 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 their part-time babysitter. She was a recent college graduate interested in working on environmental causes and had looked after Kerry’s and Max’s children in Hyannis Port that summer. Cooney moved into Bobby and Mary’s family home in Mount Kisco, New York, taking care of the kids and assisting Bobby at his environmental law clinic at Pace University during the week.

One night Cooney attended a meeting in the family kitchen with Kennedy and another young Riverkeeper volunteer named Murray Fisher to discuss business when she felt Kennedy’s hand moving up and down her leg under the table. She tried making sense of the incident in her diary, which I have read. In an entry dated November 7, 1998, she wrote:

From everything everybody says about the Kennedys + their Babysitters, they had me worried. Like I have to watch out, be careful. And the other night in the kitchen w/ Murray I could have sworn he was touching my leg + hand. It seemed like he thought I was somebody else or wasn’t paying attention. Like he would come to every once in a while and snap out of it or I would move away. It was like he was on something or really tired or was missing Mary or was testing me.

When asked about the allegation, Kennedy told a podcast on Tuesday, "I am not a church boy."
"I had a very, very rambunctious youth," he told podcaster Saagar Enjeti. "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."