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Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has defended himself against allegations of sexual assault by a former babysitter saying, “I am not a church boy.”
Kennedy spoke on the Breaking Points podcast after former babysitter Eliza Cooney alleged he assaulted her at his home in 1998, according to a Vanity Fair article.
“The article is a lot of garbage,” Kennedy said.
“Listen, I have said this from the beginning. I am not a church boy. I am not running like that,” he added. “I had a very, very rambunctious youth. 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.”
He accused Vanity Fair of “recycling 30-year-old stories” and was cagey when asked if he was denying her claims saying, “I’m not going to comment on it.”
Cooney, 48, told Vanity Fair she kept the alleged assault secret until the #MeToo movement began in 2017 and she told her mother about it.
After Kennedy, 70, announced his campaign for the presidency in 2023, Cooney also confided in two friends and a lawyer.
She was 23 when she was hired in 1998 by Kennedy and his then-wife as a live-in nanny at the family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York. She claimed Kennedy touched her leg at a business meeting and later appeared shirtless in her bedroom before asking her to rub lotion on his back.
“I thought, ‘isn’t Mary home?’” she recalled. “Doesn’t she do this for you?”
She however ended up putting the lotion on him reluctantly and quickly. “It was totally inappropriate,” Cooney said.
In another alleged assault, Cooney said Kennedy came up behind her, blocked her inside the room and groped her, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them up along her rib cage and breasts.
“My back was to the door of the pantry and he came up behind me,” she recalled. “I was frozen. Shocked.”
Kennedy, son of former attorney general and Democratic presidential nominee Robert F Kennedy, said recently that he stood by his many controversial positions and downplayed the strident public disapproval many of his famous family members have expressed for his campaign.
“I am in a position that no independent has been in history,” he said, insisting that in a head-to-head race he would beat Donald Trump and vanquish Joe Biden by a “landslide.”
The Independent has reached out to Kennedy’s campaign for comment.
