RFK Jr.’s Philandering, Late Wife’s Suicide Stay Out of Campaign
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is making his presence known. In a poll published Sunday by CNN, Kennedy registered 16 percent support when he, independent candidate Cornel West, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein were included with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. He has created even more buzz around himself given his increasingly successful effort to get on the ballots in all 50 states — he is now on the ballot in Hawaii, Utah, and, importantly, Michigan.
RFK Jr. has received copious attention from mainstream media outlets for his views on science and medicine. Numerous essays have been penned pointing to his claims that Wi-Fi causes cancer, vaccines cause autism, and COVID was engineered so that it would spare Jewish and Chinese people. In recent weeks, a column in the New York Times was headlined “The High-I.Q. Nonsense of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” a column in the Washington Post referred to him as “Misinformation-spouting RFK Jr.,” and Wired headlined coverage of him with “RFK Jr.’s Very Online, Conspiracy-Filled Campaign.”
What has oddly been virtually absent from public discussion of Kennedy’s campaign is that he has long been a serial philanderer with a history of mistreating women. He cheated on his first wife, Emily Ruth Black, with whom he had two children; then, while still legally married, he entered into a sexual relationship with his sister’s friend Mary Richardson, impregnated her, and proposed to her. Kennedy would go on to serially cheat on Mary and then seek divorce, which she adamantly contested. Richardson committed suicide after Kennedy filed divorce papers and entered into a relationship with his now-wife, Cheryl Hines (who was herself married when the two began dating). Richardson’s family has long maintained that Kennedy’s philandering and abandonment of Mary is what led her to commit suicide — although this is an accusation Kennedy adamantly denies, pointing to her mental illnesses and substance abuse problems. Mary’s sister Nan is said to have told Kennedy on the night her sister died, “You killed my sister.”
Before she died, Mary found a diary Kennedy had kept detailing his escapades with women, according to the New York Post. The diary listed 37 women he was involved with in 2001 — at which time he was legally married to Mary — and ranked the extent of the encounter one through 10, with 10 indicating intercourse (for this, there were 16 women listed). The diary notes on one day that Kennedy was involved with three separate women — with one woman listed as a “10”; at this time, his and Richardson’s son was four months old. The New York Post reported that Kennedy spoke quite oddly of women in his diary, repeatedly referring to being seduced by a woman as being “mugged” and acting as though the women were solely responsible for his cheating. One day, for instance, Kennedy wrote that he “got mugged on my way home” before recording a woman’s name and the number 10.
After the diary was reported on by the New York Post, some speculated that Richardson’s finding of this diary could have contributed to her decision to kill herself. And Mary’s friends and family have continued to push the conclusion that Kennedy’s repetitive cheating on and treatment of Mary pushed her to the brink. For example, when Kennedy announced his presidential campaign last year, actor Billy Baldwin, who had been close friends with Richardson, brought up Mary’s suicide. “If Bobby were half a man,” he said, “[Mary] would still be alive today. It will all come out. His campaign will be over in weeks. If these walls could talk.”
In his diary, Kennedy Jr. wrote of his “lust demons,” but he has done little to publicly acknowledge his serial cheating or apologize for these past mistakes. In his 2018 memoir American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family, RFK does not give mention to his womanizing — despite the book’s supposed focus on his own personal growth.
Luckily for Kennedy, he is being assisted in his effort to avoid his serial philandering — as well as the speculation about his late wife’s suicide in relation to it — by the fact that the press has given it little focus. A notable example is Kennedy’s nearly hour-long interview last week with EWTN host Raymond Arroyo. In one segment, Arroyo provided Kennedy with ample time to speak of his family and his faith, but Arroyo never inquired past Kennedy’s claims of deep Catholicism to ask about his treatment of Emily Ruth Black and Mary Richardson.
There has, however, been some scattered discussion of Kennedy’s morality problems. Last June, the Daily Mail published a column headlined “I bet you didn’t know of RFK Jr’s appalling misogyny. No one dares ask about his sex diaries — or how he tormented his suicidal wife then exhumed her from the Kennedy plot. So Bobby, are you man enough to face MY questions?”; and the New Republic in August stated, “RFK Jr. Was a Compulsive Womanizer, and Yes, We Should Care.”
Perhaps the reason such little attention has been paid to Kennedy’s womanizing is because our culture is no longer opposed to cheating on one’s spouse. Just take the raft of articles in recent months promoting “ethical nonmonogamy” and the increasingly popular idea that it would be oppressive to be sexually limited to just one’s spouse. For Republicans, Trump’s philandering and “locker-room talk” broke down the previous standard that public officials should exercise morality. For instance, when it was credibly reported last year that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem had cheated on her husband for years, virtually no one cared. Nostalgia for the Kennedys also helps people to look past Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s serially cheating on his often-pregnant wives over decades.
Moreover, Kennedy Jr. has other character issues. He has admitted to traveling on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet on two occasions. Additionally, his explanation of the trips does not line up, as he claims to have been married to Mary Richardson at the claimed time of those trips when, during at least one, he was in reality married to Emily Ruth Black. He was also addicted to heroin for 14 years. Kennedy blames this on the death of his father, but not every person who loses a parent during childhood decides to respond by abusing drugs for over a decade and a half. Kennedy Jr. was also alleged to have “pushed” his younger brother David to take psychedelics; David would later overdose at age 28. There is also Kennedy’s 2016 book, Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit, in which he falsely accuses two teenagers of committing murder.
If Kennedy Jr. maintains his substantial presence in the polls, he will need to be questioned on his character issues. Never before has a major presidential candidate been left so unquestioned about such bad behavior.
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