Robert Kennedy Jr. has positioned himself as a populist outsider in the 2024 presidential race, but it’s hard to forget that he comes from American royalty and has hobnobbed with many of the most famous and notorious people in the world. Now he faces a problem suspiciously common for megarich people (and one other presidential candidate): explaining why he flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.
In an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, host Jesse Watters asked Kennedy, “You weren’t ever on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, were you?” As a matter of fact:
“I was on it in 1993,” Kennedy said. “And I went to Florida with my wife and two children to visit my mom over Easter. My wife had some sort of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell.” He said the second trip was also with his wife at the time, Mary Richardson, and his four children to go fossil-hunting in South Dakota. You know, standard family-trip fare.
Kennedy noted that this was before any of the alleged sex crimes were public knowledge, back when Epstein was just a mysterious financier without a college degree who was known for being surrounded by extremely young women all the time. Watters did not ask a follow-up about Richardson’s relationship with Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted madam, even though Maxwell knew several members of the Kennedy family.
“I’ve been very open about this from the beginning,” Kennedy said. The candidate also noted that he was never on Epstein’s jet without his family and opined that all information surrounding Epstein’s life and death should be made public. Yet viewers at home saw his face over a rather brutal chyron — “RFK JR: I WAS ONLY ON EPSTEIN’S PLANE TWICE.”
It makes sense that a presidential candidate would need to be transparent about his connection to one of the most notorious men of our lifetimes. (Or not: Donald Trump has not exactly been forthcoming about his many, many interactions with his old Palm Beach friend.) Unfortunately for Kennedy Jr., his statement has a few flaws in it. Kennedy claimed that he was on a flight to Palm Beach, Florida, for Easter in 1993. But Epstein’s flight logs from the early ’90s show that RFK Jr. and family members flew with Epstein and Maxwell from Teterboro airport to Florida on February 17 and that they flew back on February 27 — almost two months before the Easter holiday that year. There is also no record in any publicly available Epstein flight logs of the Kennedy family’s fossil-collecting trip to South Dakota.
It is not a crime for a politician to get a date wrong 30 years ago in a life full of private air travel and famous people. But if Kennedy — who also makes an appearance in Epstein’s infamous little black book — is encouraging full transparency around this issue, he may want to get his own details ironed out between now and next November.
