In a very lengthy piece about Brainwormed conspiracy freak independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign to get convicted felon former President Trump returned to power, Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan excerpts from the 1998 diary entries by then-23 year-old Eliza Cooney, who at the time was working as the live-in babysitter to both Bobby Jr and then-second wife Mary Richardson’s four kids and as an assistant at Bobby’s environmental law clinic during office hours.
And yeah, you already knew where this was going. “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 [Bobby Jr] 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,” Cooney wrote in an entry dated November 7.
It gets worse, even worse than Bobby coming into her bedroom in the middle of the night asking for a backrub. Early the next year, Cooney wrote that she was wearing her yoga clothes and was looking for something to eat in the kitchen pantry “when Kennedy came up behind her, blocked her inside the room, and began groping her, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them up along her rib cage and breasts” per Vanity Fair’s description of an incident that could have gotten worse if not for another domestic worker coming in and interrupting. Cooney recalls that the male worker told Bobby something along the lines of “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your wife to know about” or “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do” as if this guy was Bobby’s sex addicts anonymous sponsor.
Cooney quit shortly after that. The rest of the piece contains plenty of other bad shit, not least of which was Richardson’s suicide after she discovered Bobby’s own diary. One part however sticks out probably much more than the author intended, a passing mention that Bobby’s “older brother Joseph II bowed out of a race for governor of Massachusetts after his ex-wife wrote a damaging tell-all in 1997.” No similar sense of shame will keep Brainworms out of this race.
It’ll probably be more about money than anything else, as the New York Times reports that his campaign is in triage mode, bleeding cash, laying off staffers, and singularly focused on the very money-intensive task of securing ballot access in the states. It’s not going great.