RFK Jr.’s family doesn’t want him to come forward. Even they may not know his darkest secrets.

Dunne, for his part, drew a pertinent conclusion from Kennedy’s defense: “If you were to take Kennedy at his word that he knows his cousin as well as any human being alive,” he wrote, “and you believe that Skakel murdered a girl at age 15, the logic of the conclusion is not so good for Bobby.”

Skakel had served 11 years of a 20-year sentence when, after years of appeals arguing that his lawyer had botched the defense, the conviction was overturned and Skakel was released pending a new trial (prosecutors chose not to retry it). In 2016, Kennedy published a book defending Skakel titled Box: Why Michael Skakel spent more than a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Kennedy blamed Martha Moxley’s murder on two New York teenagers, one black, the other multiracial, whom investigators had already ruled out. Written by journalist Andrew Goldman and published by Skyhorse Publishing, which also publishes Kennedy’s anti-vaccine books, Kennedy’s book claimed to have solved the murder.

“I’m absolutely certain they did it,” Kennedy said. The New York Times. (Both men denied committing the murder.)

Asked about Kennedy’s conclusions, Martha Moxley’s mother, Dorothy, said she had “never seen the truth so distorted and manipulated in her entire life.”

Kennedy acknowledged that his statements were “controversial.” “Any time you do something controversial, you lose voters,” he told the Times. “We lose support because people have opinions.”

The book, promoted by Alan Dershowitz (also author of Skyhorse) and Bill O’Reilly, further cemented Kennedy’s identity as a serial white knight jousting with the ruling establishment, whether the judiciary, corporate polluters or the pharmaceutical industry – or later, President Biden, the Democratic National Committee and his own family.

In 1994, Kennedy married Richardson, who had been Kerry Kennedy’s best friend since they attended Putney School together in Vermont. She and Bobby had four children, Conor, Kyra, Aidan, and Finn. In the fall of 1998, the Kennedys hired a 23-year-old woman, Eliza Cooney, as a part-time babysitter. She was a recent college graduate interested in working on environmental causes and had been caring for Kerry and Max’s children in Hyannis Port that summer. Cooney moved into Bobby and Mary’s family home in Mount Kisco, New York, caring for the children and assisting Bobby in his environmental law clinic at Pace University during the week.

One evening, Cooney was sitting in a meeting in the family kitchen with Kennedy and another young Riverkeeper volunteer named Murray Fisher to discuss business when she felt Kennedy’s hand moving up and down her leg under the table. She tried to make sense of the incident in her diary, which I have read. In an entry dated November 7, 1998, she wrote:

From what everyone said about the Kennedys and their babysitters, they worried me. Like I had to be careful, be careful. And the other night in the kitchen with Murray, I could have sworn he was touching my leg and my hand. I felt like he thought I was someone else or he wasn’t paying attention. Like he would come to every now and then and get over his emotions or I would pull away. It was like he was on something or really tired or he missed Mary or he was testing me.

“In the back of my mind, I was hoping that wasn’t what it really was,” said Cooney, now 48. (Reached for comment, Fisher said he worked closely with Cooney and liked her, but was unaware of her alleged experiences with Kennedy at the time, and feels bad for her.)

A few weeks later, she found Kennedy in her bedroom. She saw that her diary, which chronicled her daily activities and detailed her love life with a boyfriend, was open next to her bed. And she was shocked when Kennedy, then 45, shirtless, asked her to rub lotion on his back. “I thought, ‘Isn’t Mary home?’” she recalled. “Isn’t she doing this for you?”

She did so reluctantly and quickly. “It was totally inappropriate,” she said, adding that she stopped writing about these experiences in her journal for fear Kennedy would read them.

A few months later, Cooney said, as she was rummaging through the kitchen pantry for lunch after a yoga class, still in her sports bra and leggings, Kennedy came up from behind, pinned her inside the room, and began groping her, putting 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 from behind,” she said, describing the alleged sexual assault. “I was frozen. In shock.”