RFK Jr. Defends Himself Against Assault Accusations: 'I'm Not a Church Kid'

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. has defended himself against allegations of sexual assault by a former babysitter, saying: “I'm not a church kid.”

Kennedy spoke on the Breaking points podcast after former babysitter Eliza Cooney claimed he assaulted her at his home in 1998, according to a Vanity Fair article.

“This article is a load of garbage,” Kennedy said.

“Look, I said it from the beginning. I’m not a church kid. I don’t run that way,” he added. “I had a very, very turbulent youth. I said in my announcement speech that I had 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 cautious when asked if he denied the claims, saying: “I'm not going to comment on that.”

Cooney, 48, said Vanity Fair She kept the alleged assault a secret until the #MeToo movement began in 2017 and told her mother.

After Kennedy, 70, announced his 2023 presidential campaign, 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 home in Mount Kisco, New York. She claimed Kennedy touched her leg during a business meeting and then appeared shirtless in her bedroom before asking her to rub lotion on his back.

“I thought, ‘Isn’t Mary home?’” she recalls. “Isn’t she doing this for you?”

But she eventually applied the lotion reluctantly and quickly. “It was totally inappropriate,” Cooney said.

In another alleged assault, Cooney said Kennedy approached her from behind, pinned her inside the room and groped her, placing his hands on her hips and sliding them down her ribcage and breasts.

“I had my back to the pantry door and he came up behind me,” she recalled. “I was paralyzed. In shock.”

Kennedy, son of former attorney general and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, said recently that he stood by his many controversial positions and downplayed the strident public disapproval that many prominent members of his family expressed toward his campaign.

“I’m in a position that no independent has ever been in in history,” he said, insisting that in a head-to-head race he would beat Donald Trump and defeat Joe Biden by a “landslide.”

The Independent contacted the Kennedy campaign for comment.