Looks like the memo went out from the DNC to Vanity Fair.
RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets.
A shocking photograph. Blowback from a Trump meeting. Alleged sexual assault. The Kennedys have voiced support for Joe Biden, but certain aspects of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s character are only just now coming to light.
By Joe Hagan
July 2, 2024
Vanity Fair
Twenty years ago Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in an HBO documentary about the dangers of a nuclear plant on the Hudson River. Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister Rory Kennedy, pits the crusading Kennedys, pictured flying in a helicopter over the nuclear facility, against Entergy, the power company. The film argued that the surrounding environment would be made uninhabitable if the plant came under terrorist attack.
This was necessarily a high-stakes confrontation. In anticipation, Rory warned her production team they had a potential liability: Her brother, though a prominent and successful environmental lawyer known for suing polluters, could be fast and loose with the facts. “He can say some crazy shit,” she told them, according to a person involved in the film. Kennedy’s interviews had to be thoroughly fact-checked “even though he might come across as an expert,” she said. “That’s who he is.”
Sure enough, the film had already been edited when producers discovered that Kennedy’s interviews were littered with inflated and inaccurate claims, rendering portions of the film unusable. “It was like, Holy shit,” says another source familiar with events. “We have to get the audio and cut certain things out. We can’t really say this. You can be sued!” ...
Long before he entered the 2024 race with a wagon train of conspiracy theories, the wider Kennedy family was intimately familiar with RFK Jr.’s problematic personality—the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise, the “savior complex” (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his “pathological need for attention.” ...
Their private efforts to get Bobby to drop out—or at least wait until 2028 to run—have also come to naught. “I’ve spoken to Bobby about this race, about what’s at stake, about the importance of supporting Joe Biden, of the impact of the Trump presidency on our country and on the world,” Kerry Kennedy, who leads the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and is disciplined in how she speaks of her brother, tells me, “and I was clearly unpersuasive.” ...
The portrait family members paint of Bobby is of a man of exceptional charm, wit, brains, and generosity who has championed important environmental causes, but whose worst traits—an unnerving ease with blending fact and fiction; a powerful ability to deny the collateral damage of his own destructive actions—have engulfed his better angels. The source of these pathologies, they observe, are found in his long and troubling biography, a life story marked by personal trauma and addiction to drugs, sex, and, perhaps most perniciously of all, public adulation. ...
Article goes on to hyperventilate about a photo of RFKJr. posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. I don't remember - did VF care about little Obama snarfing up dog when he lived in Asia?
