A Vanity Fair feature that ran earlier this month laid out several startling revelations about presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including details on his anti-vaccine work and a graphic photo showing the candidate with a purported dog carcass. But most concerning was an account from Eliza Cooney, a woman who alleges that she was assaulted by Kennedy in 1998 when she worked for his family as a babysitter.
The Washington Post reported Friday that Kennedy has reached out to Cooney and apologized via text message while stating that he doesn’t remember the incident she described. NBC News later confirmed the Washington Post’s reporting and shared a screenshot of the text message in question:
In the message sent to Cooney on July 4, Kennedy began by saying he attempted to reach her by phone and preferred to speak in person. “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feeling,” he wrote. “I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”
Kennedy said he had no agenda for reaching out besides “making the most sincere and ernest [sic] amends.” The message was sent two days after Vanity Fair’s piece with her account had been published. Kennedy did not explicitly deny the allegations in an interview after the piece ran, saying, “I’m not a church boy.”
In 1998, Cooney was a 23-year-old recent college graduate who moved into Robert and his wife Mary Kennedy’s New York home to watch their children. She also worked at Kennedy’s environmental-law clinic at Pace University. In the Vanity Fair piece, Cooney recounted a moment during a meeting in the kitchen when Kennedy, who was 45 at the time, moved his hand up and down her leg under the table, an incident she described in her personal diary, which was viewed by the publication.
Cooney described other incidents involving her former boss, including one where a shirtless Kennedy pressured her to put lotion on his back and another where she alleges Kennedy came up behind her in the kitchen pantry, ran his hands up her body, and groped her breasts. “My back was to the door of the pantry, and he came up behind me,” Cooney, now 48, told the outlet. “I was frozen. Shocked.”
In an interview with the Post, Cooney did not seem to buy Kennedy’s apology. “It was disingenuous and arrogant,” she said. “I’m not sure how somebody has a true apology for something that they don’t admit to recalling. I did not get a sense of remorse.”
