Psychopathy and Sleaze: The RFK Jr. Story
The life and times of America’s most dangerous trustafarian
trustafarian (n.) “a wealthy young person who adopts an alternative lifestyle incorporating elements from non-Western cultures.” (Oxford Languages)
No question about it. Losing his father at 14 sent Bobby Kennedy Jr. on a downward spiral in life. But the deep pockets of the Kennedy clan and the specter of criminality that riddled every corner of the ascent of the Kennedy dynasty would condemn Bobby to an increasingly insular life that resulted in a gallingly inflated sense of self tied with a streak of white savior complex that played like a relic of British colonialism. As a heroin-addicted failson, an environmental “champion” (playing one on TV, at least) and in his newfound legitimization as “health advocate,” Bobby has leaned heavily if not exclusively on the cachet of his name alone, rarely if ever having to back it up with much of anything that isn’t solely performative.
And no question about it, the man has mastered one skill in his life: appearing sincere. He’d been steeped in the ins and outs of public relations the Kennedy Way from out the gate. Given the Kennedy “dynasty” was built solely on Papa Joe having barged his way onto the Boston social scene via bootlegging and extortion, the family was highly protective of their reputation. But their Iron Dome from the press first began to crack after Uncle Teddy indiscriminately threw Bobby Sr’s favorite campaign staffer, Mary Jo Kopechne, into Poucha Pond in 1969. Then in 1970, Bobby Jr. was busted for possession of marijuana along with cousin Robert Sargent Shriver, son of uncle Sargent and aunt Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and the thinly-veiled debauchery of the ever-expanding Kennedy clan quickly became frequent fodder for the tabloids.
By this point, Mama Ethel had checked out entirely, and Bobby was shuffled around from boarding school to boarding school, where, by all accounts, he was the epitome of the “do you know who my dad is?!” preppy with nothing to back his posturing and puffery. His “guardian” at the time was 54 year old Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, a longtime family friend who Papa Joe referred to as “my second son.” Lem and Jack Kennedy first met as teens at Choate School in 1933.
Early on, Lem had come out as gay to Jack, a major taboo at the time. But the flattery to Jack’s ego overrode any sense of adherence to social mores, and Lem was allowed to worm his way into the Kennedy fold. According to Lem, Jack allowed him to perform oral sex on him but would not reciprocate, believing somehow that this kept him “straight.” Whether this was an extension of Jack’s abundantly-documented insatiable sexual appetite or crumbs to keep Lem strung along, the arrangement was mutually satisfactory as the two remained close up to Jack’s assassination in 1963. Lem remained in the Kennedy orbit, and several of the women in the clan would serve as his “beard” from time to time. After Bobby Sr.’s untimely demise in 1968, Lem sought out to install himself as the father Junior never had.
But to a semi-closeted late-middle-aged man who’d enjoyed the decadence and delusion of the 1960s with the trappings of the Kennedy Compound, this father-son bond amounted to IV heroin use. Lem’s displaced lust for Jack had now attached itself to the 14 year old, disguised as excessive fawning and heaping of praise mixed with heavy substance usage. And while Lem’s love would reportedly remain unrequited altogether this time around, Bobby Jr. quickly learned to use this one-sided affinity to his advantage. Bobby figured out that all he needed was to be a little coquettish once in a while, maybe an oopsie-daisy flash here and there, and Lem kept him in supply of China white and narcissism juice, pumping him up as the “second coming of JFK.”
While riding the white horse, Bobby also took up falconry as a hobby, seeing the predatory avian as his spirit animal, and in 1975 slurred his way through a one-hour TV special called “The Last Frontier,” produced by friend, former Nixon campaign chair and future Fox News head Roger Ailes.
Bobby nodded out as the Kennedy name slid him through Harvard and the London School of Economics. Kurt Anderson later wrote about routinely buying dope off Bobby while the two attended Harvard, where Bobby reportedly tried to raise his profile as the top supplier of cocaine on campus. In 1978 he turned his (in all likelihood ghostwritten) senior year thesis into his first book, the creatively-title Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., a biography. He appeared on WCVB Channel 5 with Eileen Prose to promote the book, where his heroin use is on full display in the signature opioid rasp in his voice (see Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain) and his near-comatose efforts at laying on the “Kennedy charm.”
As Ronald Reagan began to pose a genuine threat to then-incumbent president Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election cycle, Uncle Teddy determined he alone was the one to save the Democratic Party and ran a primary challenge campaign. While a victory over a sitting president would have been a long-shot to begin with, Bobby did his uncle no favors as campaign surrogate.
On January 24, Alabama State Rep. Alvin Holmes called for Bobby to step down from the campaign after he remarked to the New York Times that the Carter campaign was effectively buying black votes in Holmes’ state.
The next day, Bobby showed up late to an event at the Butler Street YMCA in Atlanta. With the intended guests, the Hungry Club, having already left, Bobby mumbled campaign soundbites at a pack of teens in the gymnasium while declaring he could win over any voter in ten minutes as his sunken, dark-circled eyes stared directly through WSB-TV’s camera.
On February 4, he remarked to the Richmond Times-Dispatch that “I’ve never had a Chappaquiddick question except from the press,” going on to assert that voters had no remaining concerns over the lack of accountability in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.
On February 12, he challenged all three of Carter’s sons, Jeff, Jack and Chip, to a debate, but they declined, with campaign coordinator Charles Graves adding such a debate “would serve no purpose.”
On March 17, he blew off a scheduled event in Greensboro, North Carolina, standing up around 130 attendees of the Young Democrats Club to opt instead to kick it in Puerto Rico with Lem, where he’d presumably scored a connect on some primo shit. Bobby’s main contribution to the campaign otherwise came down to painting Carter as a flip-flopper and smarmily declaring the president would see the writing on the wall and step aside for Teddy.
On May 28, 1981, Lem Billings died in his sleep of a heart attack. His last wish would be honored: “I want the young Kennedy boys to carry my casket.” Bobby delivered the eulogy:
'He felt pain for every one of us — pain that no one else could have the courage to feel ... I don't know how we will carry on without him. In many ways, Lem was like a father to me and he was the best friend I will ever have.'
Meanwhile, Aunt Eunice commented, “I’m sure he's already organizing everything in heaven so it will be completely ready for us — with just the right Early American furniture, the right curtains, the right rugs, the right paintings, and everything ready for a big, big party."
Though the column layout in the People section of the October 12, 1981 Albuquerque Tribune dubiously leads the passive reader to believe Bobby was getting hitched to country music icon Barbara Mandrell, the text below confirms instead that “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Emily Black have settled on each other.” They married on April 3, 1982 in Bloomington Indiana.
The headlines jokingly proclaimed “Bachelor Days End Tonight for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” Of course, being a Kennedy, a heroin and cocaine addict and having JFK’s DL as the closest thing to any kind of parental presence in his life, Bobby’s “bachelor days” would do anything but end, continuing largely uninterrupted through three marriages up to as recently as September of 2024 when news broke of his sexting relationship with “journalist” Olivia Nuzzi. The perpetual conflict between Bobby’s infantile need for a codependent caretaker against the “lust demons” he’d cultivated out of “obligation” to “live up to the Kennedy name” would leave poor RFK Jr. forever unlucky in love. Which of course only added to his appeal to wine moms in more recent times.
Driving wife #2 Mary Kathleen Richardson (married April 15, 1994) to suicide on May 16, 2012 gave him 75% of the sinister allure Scott Peterson continues to enjoy among a certain demographic.
Meanwhile, current wife (as of this writing, January 4, 2025) Cheryl Hines became a Kennedy on August 2, 2014 in Hyannisport. The two had met cute at a 2006 fundraiser, putting poor Cheryl now in the unfortunate 18+ year window where, by history, Bobby has lost interest in both unions he’d previously made a vow to God to uphold “until death do us part.” It is unknown as of this writing if their prenuptial agreement involves or somehow leaves open the possibility to involve cryptocurrency, but for Cheryl’s sake, I hope not.
For a more in-depth and thoroughly-sourced list of well-documented scumbag behavior towards females, see the document below.
Meanwhile, on September 16, 1983, Bobby’s brazen substance use came to a head on a flight to Rapid City, South Dakota, where he had come to meet a buddy he’d met stumping for Teddy named Bill Walsh carrying a suitcase full of heroin. Bobby decided to get faded for the trip but instead OD’d, and instead of his intended destination of Deadwood, Bobby was arrested for heroin possession. While lore would have one believe this episode was his rock bottom, starting Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. on a 41-year-and-counting road to recovery, what stands far more to reason is the Kennedy machine saw the opportunity to spin the affair into a positive and kill two birds with one stone by having Bobby serve his sentence of “community service” by tacking him onto Robert H. Boyle’s newly-founded Riverkeeper initiative which had aimed to tackle pollution in the Hudson River. The judge was so impressed with Bobby’s newfound passion for the cause that his two year probation was cut in half.
All of this good press helped to sweep under the rug the overdose death of brother David Kennedy from a combination of Demerol and cocaine in the Brazilian Court Hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida on April 25, 1984, a slow suicide driven in part by big brother Bobby’s lifelong taunting verging on psychological abuse from an early age. (One reported episode involved Bobby dosing his then 14 year old brother with LSD without his knowledge, then convincingly faking his own death, taking delight in David’s “bad trip.”)
What Bobby had actually discovered was that sanctimonious (paid) speaking engagements and showing up for the occasional publicity stunt were the exact bare minimum he needed to not only rehab his image but elevate himself among a growing sea of Kennedys. In particular, the ample supply of fresh paramours to be found within the naively optimistic side of environmental activism made the choice to make defending Mother Earth Bobby’s new thing a no-brainer…
By the 90’s, Bobby’s paths had crossed with a Florida-based attorney with a passion for the environment and a penchant for the camera named Mike “Pap” Papantonio. At age 9, Mike barely survived a house fire, suffering third degree burns over 30 percent of his body. It is fully possible this experience, consciously or otherwise, informed his choice of to name his radio show-turned-podcast after June Carter’s timeless classic The Ring of Fire.
Pap first rose to prominence in 1983 after successfully defending DeSoto County School Board member Elsworth, “Buddy” Keen, then 40, from misdemeanor charges of battery against a 14 year old female who’d babysat for his then-estranged wife. Despite Pap’s efforts, Keen wound up abruptly resigning from the DeSoto School Board anyway on November 12, informing no one in advance and citing only a “clique of friends who tried to ruin me politically [and] force my resignation as a School Board member” in a letter to the Board riddled with unsubstantiated allegations of mismanagement of funds.
The following year Pap began co-hosting a cable access program called Law Line, first on Cox Cable 6 before moving to BlabTV. When Pap’s personal injury practice began to specialize in mass torts, his mutual interests aligned with Bobby’s as the Riverkeepers became a franchise operation, tapping donor pockets and pussy in communities across the country. The Ring of Fire, originally co-hosted by Pap and Bobby, launched as part of Air America Radio’s original weekend programming block in 2004, airing Saturdays from 3-6p EST.
Helming the weekday primetime slot alongside was The Majority Report, co-hosted by accomplished 90s fixture Janeane Garofalo and, at the time, objectively less-accomplished cohost Samuel Lincoln Seder. After Janeane’s departure in September 2006, the third hour was cut to make room for EcoTalk with Betsy Rosenberg, continuing as The Sam Seder Show for less than a year, then as Seder on Sundays from 4-7pm until its cancellation in June 2008. After the folding of Air America Radio in 2010, Sam was brought on as co-host of The Ring of Fire while re-launching The Majority Report as a podcast.
By 2016, according to Seder in an email, Bobby’s move to the West Coast in hopes of going Hollywood on the back of his latest wifey (Curb Your Enthusiasm was gearing up for its 17th season on HBO) had eclipsed his interest in The Ring of Fire. His last appearance on the show was his latest photo-op at the protest for the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near Cannonball, North Dakota in August 2016. In September, Bobby left Levin Papantonio to join Morgan & Morgan (he appears to have joined Pap’s firm in 2009, though they declined to respond to any of my inquiries.)
On January 9, 2017, Bobby met with president-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Afterwards, he held a press conference to announce that Trump would be appointing him to lead a commission on review of vaccine safety. Back in 1998, The Lancet had published a hoax study by Andrew Wakefield claiming to link the ingredient thiamidol used at the time in MMR vaccines to autism. By 2004, the study had been thoroughly debunked and retracted by The Lancet and Wakefield stripped of his medical license. But the internet of things ensured that, by 2016, Donald Trump’s bold campaign promise of choose-your-own-reality meant a considerable swath of the populace was now entitled to selectively accept or reject scientific fact to suit their preferences. Celebrity wine moms like Jenny McCarthy who were looking for a scapegoat to blame their children’s autism on would continue to cling to this solitary work of science fiction to validate their own diet-eugenics worldview, and the anti—vaccine-to-QAnon pipeline became more of an elbow joint. Bobby’s strategy for going Hollywood was to cash in on his surname by leaning into his newly-discovered skepticism over the government-sanctioned versions of events around the time of the 50th anniversary of Jack’s assassination, dovetailing this with the conspiracy theorism flush throughout the antivax movement, now rebranded as “vaccine hesitancy.”
The news that one of the biggest rising stars in pseudoscience was going to benefit from Trump’s “I recognize him from the TV” approach to filling cabinet positions immediately drew fierce and near-unanimous concerns across the medical field. Press Secretary Hope Hicks denied anything formal had been agreed upon, but on February 16, Bobby held another hourlong press conference, insisting he was still in talks with the White House while blasting the CDC as a “cesspool of corruption.” He told Politico on February 25 his commission would be “made up of Americans of the highest integrity” including “corporate CEOs” and “doctors on television.” The White House continued to decline to comment, and reports began to trickle out by February 2018 that Trump “appeared to abandon” the initiative. Bobby then set about peddling his latest effort to cash in on his namesake. Bobby had been teasing a deal with HarperCollins for an insider bio on the Kennedy Family as early as 2012, and the release of American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family would serve as a vehicle to ingratiate himself among Cheryl’s limousine liberal pals while continuing to play footsie with conspiracy theorists as “the Kennedy who will speak truth to power.”
It was this angle, a Kennedy willing to openly speak out not only against the insulting absurdity of the Warren Report but also that the government-sanctioned account of Sirhan Sirhan assassinating Bobby Sr. was about as plausible as Jeffrey Epstein hanging himself, that snagged this writer into Junior’s periphery for a moment. Having zero awareness of about 95% of what I’ve written in this article up to now, I was heavily in favor of a serious primary challenge to Joe Biden, so I rooted for his campaign out the gate. Then I learned Dennis Kucinich, the Bernie Sanders to a handful of Gen Xers like myself whose “political awareness” first began to take shape around the 2004 election, was his campaign chair, and the prospect of seeing The Spinach Elf himself back in action was enough for me to sign up as a volunteer.
To confirm, my contribution to the campaign amounted to a lot of asking, to no avail, who was in charge of anything. Specifically, I offered up my background in graphic design, but no one seemed to be able to figure out who would be the one to sign off on an official campaign logo. Because someone needed to, I was prepared to assert myself as interim head of A/V design, but by the time I’d reached out to Kucinich directly, Bobby announced he was dropping out of the DNC primary race and running instead as an independent. Kucinich’s remarks immediately following Bobby’s announcement remain nowhere to be found, so I bounced from the campaign with him after this.
Looking back on those few months, I see now how and why I was gaslit by Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. On the January 12, 2017 episode of The Ring of Fire, immediately following Bobby’s Trump Tower meeting, Pap and Sam Seder carry considerable water for the man they still identify as their “co-host” and the motivations behind his controversial “vaccine hesitancy.” And while Pap’s water-bearing is considerably more full-throated, the script both appear to be reading from in the clip mirrors, nearly word for word, the same apologism I found myself forced to espouse whenever I began to bring up the theoretical validity of RFK Jr.’s candidacy years later. Some of the language had been fed to me directly by the campaign, the rest I took on of my own volition in support of someone who’d convincingly presented themselves to me more broadly as a “truth-teller,” albeit misguided in this one area. Along the way, I even found myself giving the same inordinate weight to his off-the-rack store-bought reputation as a “water defender.”
The narcissistic depravity of the role he played in the deaths of 83 Samoans through the 2019 vaccine misinformation campaign he lead there, only to turn around and deny he had any culpability in its outcome, might be the clearest display yet of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr’s psychopathic skill at lying bald-faced out of both sides of his mouth and the craven opportunism that underlies it. But at any rate, don’t be surprised to learn that Bobby’s ultimate solution to the healthcare crisis in the U.S. ends up somehow being cryptocurrency.
And of course banning pasteurization.
Please take a moment to go over that pre-nup again, Cheryl. It may literally save your life.
DISCLAIMER: This article is not intended to be an all-encompassing or comprehensive case for why Robert Francis Kennedy Junior is irredeemable trash, simply a companion piece to the mountain of information available which already affirms that reality. It is also not an offer to “look into” everyone’s particular pet conspiracy theory (read: validate because they can’t seem to themselves.) Thank you for reading.
I'm a little surprised you didn't explore the (Ethel)Skakel side of RFK's family. Cousin Michael had a lot to answer for when it came to his disappearance following the Moxley murder. I lived in Greenwich when Martha was clubbed to death with a golf club from Skakel's garage. Michael landed in Europe the next day. Everyone knew Michael was guilty. It was so obvious we didn't need a rumor mill to convict the guy. We also knew how much influence the Skakel family had. The Skakels and the Moxleys lived in posh "Belle Haven". The same neighborhood that tried to keep Diana Ross from buying a home there. ( she's the wrong color)
Wow, what a disgusting excuse for journalism. I came here, after being disappointed by Kennedy’s recent statement that anti-semitism is a massive health threat, expecting I might read something that actually discredited him in a legitimate way. Instead, all I got was moralising (I don’t care if he used to be a druggy and a playboy!) and an awful lot of unsupported conjecture and unsupported character assassination. You constantly describe his actions as though you have a special inside knowledge of his motivations, yet provide no evidence for them. This is so blatantly a hit piece it’s laughable, to be honest. Pure propaganda.
Your opinion that he lacks any actual intelligence, communication skills or substance is also laughable to anyone that has ever listened to him speak or read one of his books. Sure, someone else could have written the books perhaps (I don’t think so), but his interviews in which he frequently cites specific research papers to back up his coherent and articulate arguments cannot be faked. He knows his topic and he’s an excellent communicator, despite his vocal dystonia.
Shame on you.