Also media, Ah, what's cold? My open it? Well that doesn't sound very good at all. Cody, come on in here, help me out with this. I hey, like, I'm floundering here.
What's intro? Myduction? How's it going? Everybody out there?
What a pro? What a pro? Just knocked it out of the park, Cody, Welcome to my show, d Behind the Bastards a podcast bad Thank you all about him? Cody. It has been an eventful news week since we started the r K Junior episodes.
It really has.
Yeah.
I didn't realize that until we hopped on again. How it happened since last week record?
I was like, hey, Cody, remember that when we recorded the day before former President Trump had an assassination attempt on his life.
It was the day before the day before, and then and then it kept going. The news just kept going.
Yeah, the news kept going.
Attempted assassination attempt r n C. Who jd Vance?
What a weird guy?
Uh? Yeah? Jd Vance buck the couch, all the all the hells.
Then it was then it was Jovid, and then it was jover and and now.
We're here.
Age I don't know. Yeah, the k Hives glorious return I guess what a wild time. So I don't know, we'll say what what next week brings.
Uh, I mean maybe tomorrow or today something will happen. Maybe maybe maybe things will just never stop happening now.
Yeah, maybe things are always going to keep happening. Yeah. Fuck, I don't even know what else to say about it. But you know who understands the way our current national feeling of whiplash and uh, just like mind dulling shock, uh is a guy who has been going through it
longer than we have our FK Junior Junior. I sat down to write these episodes basically when I was on the plane to the RNC right after Trump had been a shot, and like the whole the jarring nature of just that, which was several twists in the national story ago, made me think of RFK Junior. Obviously, the you know, the obvious reason would be that you know, he lost his dad during a presidential campaign because an assassin shot him.
Right, well, yeah, assassination attempts, I think, just make you think of Kennedy's.
Right, right obviously. Yeah, and yeah it kind of continues. You know that campaign they had to find a new guy to run, didn't wind up working out well in this case, and that it kind of continues these weird, distorted, maybe reversed echoes of nineteen sixty eight, that this whole election has where it's like, it's a lot like sixty eight.
But not it's so interesting, howeah, it's so like it, but so not.
Yeah. Mostly I thought of RFK Junior, because the whole sordid business was clear, Like everything that happened to Trump, like everything detail that's come out about the Corey comparatory, the guy who died instead of Trump's, it's really clear evidence of the severe, maybe terminal brain rot at the
heart of this country. You know, not just our fetishistic love of guns, although that's a part of it, or all the conspiracy theories, but the casual derangement of even regular, everyday people, the warping of sins and sensibility that you have to endure not only is part of life here, but to like survive in the United States. In the first comments I made to my own posts on the assassination, I saw people theorizing that it was a false flag.
That one of my favorites, and I think we're even past this now, was that Trump had bladed himself slicing his own ear with the hidden racer like a wrestler. And then on the right wing side, obviously people immediately decided to blame the female Secret Service age on Trump's team.
America.
He means the women after he was already shot at.
Yes, yes, he immediately he thanked during his speech because obviously you're not going to talk shit about your bodyguards.
Yeah, that would be a bad move.
But what's really going on with all of this is that reality has fractured entirely in this country. The shooting of Donald Trump was a prism, and the color of light that we run through that prism and the direction we shoot at it is going to determine what comes out the other end. We're living in like reality a la carte. You and me and everyone we know. We're in the process of coping with this, and we're doing mixed jobs of it. But RFK Junior has spent his
entire life pretty much in this space. Right for him, reality fractured back in nineteen sixty eight, and there's never really been any chance of fixing what's broken. We've already discussed a few of the ways that he started coping with this brokenness as a young man. Some of these ways were not unhealthy. You know. He leaned into his hobbies, even if they are crazy, rich guy hobbies.
Yeah, yeah, he leaned into his hobbies. Described the hobbies before.
They're baffling. Yeah, they're unhinged hobbies, but they are hobbies, hobbies, And he and his friends used humor to help themselves cope and find control in the chaos, which is, you know, not a bad way to deal with it. But he also turned to drugs to cope. And when you've got a fracture, you know, a fractured bone or a fracture
of reality, nothing covers up the pain like heroin. Bobby was using heroin and any other narcotic he could get his hands on by the time he got to Harvard, and that was not his only coping tactic for dealing with the pain and uncertainty of a world that for him had never been quite sane. Lim Billings remained his primary adult authority figure and anchor to sanity. Now Lim legitimately cared about him, which put Bobby ahead of a
lot of his fellows. But Lim also wanted him to be the new JFK, and Bobby wanted to oblige him. JFK had first risen to superstardom by dint of his perceived tremendous heroism as the captain of PT one O nine. That heroism had already helped drive another Uncle Joe to an early grave. But Lim felt that for Bobby to have a chance of taking on that mantle, he needed to do something brave, something that would just as crucially
let him make the news for being brave. And I'm going to quote again from Oppenheimer's book here as to what they decided to do in the summer of nineteen seventy four, before Bobby began his junior year at Harvard. Lim Billings proposed that they explore the very isolated and dangerous a paramac Reverence Southern Peru, and adventure that Bildings had convinced Bobby would engrave his name alongside that of his father and his uncle Jack in terms of bravery
and daring. Several of his school chums went along, as well as David Kennedy, and they benefited from the best guides and equipment that money could buy. But there's a fairly low ceiling on how safe a journey like this could be right. You're all you're going to be in danger even if you have the money for the best equipment.
And Bobby immediately gets dysentery, and his dysentery is exacerbated, as Oppenheimer writes, by his refusal to eat anything but the weirdest shit he could find, quote including boiled rat, pulling out the eyes from the dead rodan's head and popping them into his mouth. Billings, who idolized Bobby, did
the same. Bobby could also kill a chicken for food in a split second by snapping its neck between two of his fingers, and he had the ability to drink half a bottle of beer then press his hand down on the bottle's mouth, making the thick glass bottom fall out.
Bobby, what are you doing? Life?
Just like what a sicko?
What a sicko. He's not even a weirdo, he's a sick of.
It's like that baffling.
Oh yeah, there's just like a level here. That's it's not even like you're like, oh you're up here. It's parallel. You've escaled, you've escaped here and you've gone sideways to just this other world that is ah, well, did it cures dysentery eating the rats.
I don't think it cured is dysentery, Cody, I do think it again, I think it explains the worm.
I was gonna say, like when you were like, he decided they decided to do something like dangerous. I was like, so they decided to give him a brainworm. They were just like, we're gonna put this in your brain.
Yeah, we're gonna live on the river, right.
Yeah, like voluntarily getting a skull.
America will love you, Bobby, if you live on the river and eat rat ies. Some Americans were so funny, so they brought with them on this journey down the river in Peru a veritable medicine cabinet full of drugs which a doctor had given them to accommodate potential illnesses. Bobby put himself in charge of the trip's medicine cabinet, and mostly he spent the trip downing every bit of morphine and every OPIUF that they had been given. Now having been I've had dysentery before, and I would have
taken morphine if I'd had the opportunity. But his friends were frustrated because when they were sick and they asked for medicine. He would tell them, no, man, we got to save the drugs for emergencies.
Well he's not wrong.
You shouldn't have saved.
That's what he was doing. But the thing, it's true lie that he said.
Yeah, it's a true lie. That's where that movie came from. Cody RFK holding out on his friends in the jungle. So David became kind of unsettled.
In the dark the quarter, it's being like, no eat the rat. Slowly he did sexually.
So David was unsettled by his brother's behavior in the jungle, but cousin Chris Lawford was amazed. He considered this trip they were taking such a JFK worthy act that he started referring to Bobby as Jack and Lim Lim is like, yes, call him Jack.
No worse, that makes it so much worse. You're ruining him. You're like destroying this man.
This is like the most most brain damage I can imagine giving a young man.
Just like popping him full of drugs and calling him Jack. Like that's not good for doing.
A heart of darkness, to turn him into his uncle.
God, what do you expect again? Just like no chance this guy, no chance.
No you gotta remember, he's incredibly good looking as a young man. He's got that Kennedy good looks, and so
his friends he's very photogenic. His friends take pictures of Bobby like fording rivers and doing these insane whitewater rapids rides and everything, and they get into the news because he's a Kennedy, right, anything he does is newsworthy, and people are so excited by these pictures of Bobby Kennedy Junior looking hot on the river like like a little adventurer, that it draws the attention of a forward thinking TV executive who like sees these and is like, oh, there's
potential here, Cody. You want to guess the name of that TV executive?
Oh? No, is it?
Is?
It an Ales kind of guy.
Roger literally Roger?
As it is? It is, Oh, well, good for that relationship to blossom.
Who else could it have been?
Who else could it have been? I know? But my god?
All right, yeah, there's three guys into a world.
There are three people, like the world has three guys and they just bounce around.
Now, the future father of Fox News was at this point consulting for TV in a prototype conservative news network funded by the heir to the Core's beer fortune.
Uh.
This all culminated in a TV show their relationship. Ales and Bobby's on a TV show about Bobby's next adventure this time, No, they were going to put him in in Africa. They were going to do a safari in Africa with Bobby Kennedy Junior, titled The Last Frontier. Some of the details of this are interesting. Bobby was a smoker, but he refused to be filmed smoking on camera because
he felt that public figures shouldn't smoke. He at this point claimed he didn't want to be He accepted that he was a public figure, but he didn't want to have a political career, which given what happened to his uncle and his dad, makes complete sense. Sure, he told this to Ales during an interview. People with advantages in our society can use them to change the system and help large groups of people. The more they have advantages, the more they can help, and the more they should help.
So's that's his attitude at this point in his life, right, Sure, which.
Is I mean, I appreciate his position on public figures not smoking cigarettes. He like understands like yeah, like this is a tacit endorsement, and I can make my decision, but.
Yeah, I shouldn't push it on kids or use the level of cool that I have by virtue of being a Kennedy to like make this.
And I'm a Kennedy, got all these advantages and privileges and stuff. I should use them to help people. And right right on, you should maybe talk to somebody other than Roger Hale's.
Maybe I'll talk to Roger Ales about this. He may not be gat to help, but you get where he comes from here. He also get where this can lead in toxic directions, right because like the idea that you know, to whom much is given, much is owede. There's a degree of sense in that, but it also leads to this no less oblige idea that like, well, we're the natural ruling class, you know, America needs me running things. He's not there yet, but that's where he's going to head.
From what I can tell, he did fine on camera. He was a good like person to film, I guess, but he claims he didn't really enjoy the work quote I'm no actor. If we had to do a second take, I just fell apart. It was fun, though I knew I did have to adapt to this environment in Africa. I wasn't stuck somewhere that I couldn't get out of. It was sort of like Harvard students working in a factory and playing blue collar workers for a while. I don't know if it's how like that it is.
I mean, well, right, like it's like in that example, it's like, oh, you're like kind of faking like you're this person. You're doing this thing, like you're like you're like that, but like this guy's hawking by like ransom meat. Like, yeah, this isn't like he's not cause playing as a weirdo who does this right.
Yeah, he does come by the eating bush meat, honestly, bush meat morphine. Yeah, that's his breakfast of champions.
He's not you know, there's no pretending there. That's no pure Bobby.
That is pure Bobby. Speaking of Harvard, though, Bobby was not a student who did very well. Right, there's not a lot to write home about in terms of his academic performance. But in nineteen seventy five, while he is entering his twenties and starting on the path to becoming a lawyer and adventuring in his part time, one of his cousins probably but not definitely, committed a murder. Cody.
There's another swing here, right, They're always are. There's a lot of deaths and scandals within the Kennedys, and most people just know about the big ones, but boy, there's a lot.
Now.
We're not going to cover all of them, but this one is extremely relevant because Bobby is going to put himself in the middle of this case as an adult. So the victim here was the daughter of another wealthy, prominent family who lived near the Kennedy compound, fifteen year old Martha Moxley. And I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times. Here, Martha Moxley, fifteen, fails to show up at home after roaming her neighborhood in Greenwich with her friends. Her body is found bludgeoned
and stabbed, half hidden beneath pine trees. A broken golf club is found nearby, believed to have been used in the killing. The murder rattles the town, which is considered extremely safe. Nearly two years after the tea's death, many Greenwich residents wonder why a broad police investigation has yielded no arrests. Martha was last seen alive on the lawn of a friend, Thomas Scackle, seventeen, Michael's older brother. The brothers are nephews of Ethel Scackle Kennedy, the widow of
Robert F. Kennedy. The police traced the golf club used in the killings to the collection of the Scackle family. Thomas and another young man are considered suspects, though both past lie detector tests. So that's fucked up right now. Bobby's not involved at all in this at this point, right,
He's not going to be involved for years. But I needed this is kind of when this happens chronologically in the Bobby Kennedy story, and I'll need you to remember Martha Moxley because this whole case is going to become very relevant later. So later in nineteen seventy five, the same year that this happened, Bobby got involved in his first political campaign, not as a candidate, but helping his college buddy Peter Shapiro win election to the local Assembly
in New Jersey. Bobby mostly knocked on doors, but Shapiro would later claim that his mere presence got the news attention and is probably what sinsed him the election. Right, I got elected because I had a Kennedy on my back and like that still holds a lot of water. In nineteen seventy six, Bobby was in his final year at Harvard, and he picked as the subject for his thesis,
recent historical and political changes in Alabama. Governor George Wallace, the segregation forever guy, had just been shot and paralyzed in an assassination attempt. Bobby recalled later being shocked to find that the poor white, working class people who'd been the backbone of his uncle's presidential victory had shifted political allegiances right basically, like, Wow, these different states that used to be the stronghold of the Democratic Party with my
dad was in charge, they all seem to be very racist. Now, what could have possibly happened? How do we solve for this?
No, there's no political theory about that.
No, no, no, no, one's no. One spent a lot of time studying, and Bobby eventually he's got to find out how to get those people back on his side. Unfortunately, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Bobby and his friend Peter Kaplan even wound up interviewing Wallace for the thesis. Although Oppenheimer speculates that Bobby didn't actually write the thesis. He thinks that Bobby had Peter do it for him, which is exactly how Bobby works. Right, It's good enough
that I attached my name to this. I don't actually have to sit down and write the goddamn thing, right, someone else can? People just need to see a Kennedy's exactly. He's a Kennedy. We don't do our own things.
Plus plus he's he's too busy hawk two eying.
Oh god, what Sophie. That that joke was two weeks ago. We moved on. I have passed that I'm.
Still at the restaurant, which is a joke.
You don't.
Also, that was at.
Least that was one attempted assassination ago.
That was one attempted presidential assassination. To go, we're past it. I wonder if the hawk twoy girl had something to do with shooting Trump. Not impossible, Not impossible? Yeah, yeah, because I know she's a Biden stand now, so.
You know, what is possible that it's time for ads?
It is possible that it's time for ADS. I can't guarantee that, I can't prove it, you know, I just have a gut feeling in my heart, deep down inside, mate, that it might be time for ads. We are back. So RFK, you know, nineteen seventy six, does his thesis and it's going to be a couple years later after he's he's out of college, kind of doing law school, so he's graduated from Harvard that he's going to help in another election campaign. This one in nineteen eighty is
his uncle Ted's reelection campaign. David Horowitz, future co writer of the book The Kennedy's, was with him for this, and even though Bobby had a girlfriend at the time, Horowitz later wrote, Bobby had a girl in every place. There were women there like moths to the flame. I just know that he was fucking everything in sight. By the end of the day, the rest of us were exhausted, and Bobby was ill, had the flu or something, and all of us collapsed. But there was a girl waiting
for him. I was younger then, and I'm a healthy male, but I wouldn't have wanted just to go to bed with a strange woman. What is another fuck going to do for you? It was just insanity, compulsive, nutty with him. Maybe in his mind he was building this heroic myth. He certainly couldn't have been getting a lot of pleasure when he was running over a one hundred fever and looked really ill and was horse. He had one girl who was a campaign worker, so he always had that one.
At one campaign event, he just went off to screw her. So I think what's interesting about that because Horowitz is kind of a slimy figure in this He's writing this book basically taking notes on his friends as they're doing this. But I'm interested in the fact that he's, like, maybe he was having all of this casual sex with every woman he could find, even when it did not make
him happy he was ill. He saw it as part of the myth, like his dad and his uncle are both these famous philanderers, and he's like, he's New Jack, right, He's New Jack. Right, I have to fuck everything that'll have me. Right, I'm the New Jack. And that's what Jack did.
Yeah, it's I mean, yeah, he's trying to do that.
Yeah, he's in New Jack City here. Yeah. So Bobby also keeps using heroin heavily alongside limb billings. Horowitz were called that during Ted's campaign, they would drink heavily and like one of the things they would do because there's no laws for Kennedy's, He and his friends would all be in a motorcade together and they would be passing
beer and cigarettes between each other's vehicles while driving. Horowitz wrote, that's the kinds of things Bobby did, perfectly illegal and crazy, and he did them because he was used to people keeping silent, because nobody wants to be banished from the Kennedy magic circle and lose access. Right, He's just like breaking the law in dangerous ways to do it because he can.
Yeah, flaunting it. It's almost like a challenge. Uh yeah, try and stop me.
Try and stop me, and if you if you have any issue with my behavior, then you're out. You're cut off from the Kennedy's, and nobody wants to be cut off from the Kennedy's. That's the most exciting thing you can be connected to.
Yeah, God, it's like a must torn with all so many of these stories. I'm like, that's like pretty cool, but also like yeah, but also like don't do that and obviously like you could have killed somebody, right, Like, it's just like scumbag rich kid behavior, right.
Ted Kennedy had that chap aqutic right exactly, like, oh, yeah, you get you people do are not do not care if you actually hurt somebody, right, as long as it's not a Kennedy. Yeah, you don't really care that much about hurting a Kennedy used.
To and you're like, yeah, you got so many.
Yeah, we've got plenty of Kennedy's. Horowitz describes Bobby's heroin use this time at the time as accelerating due to his associations with Lim, who goaded him on with promises that he's going to be like his uncle JFK in the future. Right, we'll do we'll do Heroin and talk about the fact that you're going to be the next.
Jack God.
Lim was doing. I love the way Horoinz writes this, Lim was doing Heroin with Bobby and shooting delusions up his ass that he would be president one day.
Wow.
That well, it's like he's on heroin, but the real heroine is his uncle's legacy.
Right right then the words of encouragement are the real Yeah.
Never encouraged kids, you might make them into this god. Bobby went to Uva after Harvard to continue his studies, and he rented a room at a farm owned by the family of one of his friends. One of the women who lived there, Connie Dempsey, had serious issues with how RFK handled his animals, particularly with the fact that after moving away from Millbrook and the pit of rotting carcass is there, he continued to want to fee his
hawk the grossest meat he could find. Oppenheimer writes he had built an outdoor cage on Dimpsey's property to house his falcon, but he also chose to feed it disgusting roadkill that he's stored in Dempsey's home refrigerator. We tried to encourage him to buy chickens for this purpose, but we weren't too successful.
The fuck is wrong with this guy, Like like this roadkill, like dead rotting flesh thing is so fucking weird.
Man, Like I've almost I'm gonna put in their family refrigerator, letting.
Me live with them.
It's not just like the rotting flesh thing, which is weird, but forcing it on everybody in his life, like in this aggressive way, like it just it's gotten. It's too far, it's too much at a certain age, Like I know, like, ah, you're all these people are dying, you know, and like.
You deal with processing day.
To go to the rotty flesh pit, fine, but to carry that for so long and give it to everybody around just what's going on.
You can buy another refrigerator, but what happening here and this is you know, we've talked a lot about how I think he has some legitimate skill with animals. He has at this point, I think given that up to a degree because he's he's so unreliable in terms of where he is, Like he just leaves his dog with them. He leaves these animals with the people who are like,
suppose taking care of him. There's always someone who will let him live with them because he's a Kennedy and he kind of just abandons his animals to them repeatedly.
Does he go get them back? Like is it like, oh, like weeks? Yeah, I'll be.
It just creates problems and it's very weird. I want to read another quote from Oppenheimer. Well, he had taught the Dimsees and others in his Uva circle. He's going to Uva at this point how to handle his bird. He had upset the horse loving Dempsey when he began riding with the falcon on his arm, which upset the horse and made it crazy, like he just doesn't give a shit about how his actions affect anyone around him.
Yeah. Yeah, which is also like it's it's not weird again, it's like this, Yeah, I'm sorry, fucked up kid in his fuck up family. But it seemed like at least a beginning, he'd like had an affinity for animals, like maybe he was going to transfer any like empathy or care or consideration he would have he should have for like human beings and just be like, oh, I care about animals. But it doesn't seem like he does that either,
Like except for his hawk. I guess it's like him and his hawk against the world a little bit.
It's just me and my hawk. That's all that. That's all I got. Gotta scare horses and cops with it.
Gotta have something. It's like again, it's like, yeah, it's you know, he's got hobbies and companions. Okay, describe the hobbies and companions.
Yeah, are they healthy hobbies and companions for him to have? Maybe potentially, potentially being a hot guy could be a healthy hobby, but Bobby has now Bobby always lets it go well past the point where it would be healthy.
He's putting roadkill in his friend's refrigerators. That's the line.
That's a lot in Bobby. So after he concludes his time at law school and he goes to UVA, Bobby gets a job as an assistant District Attorney in Manhattan. And again that's only a Kennedy could make that jump with the record.
That he's gotten, right, Yeah, he wants to do that.
And of course his drug use only escalates at the point at which he is the assistant DA of Manhattan, and he continues pushing drugs on his brother as part kind of a hobby, Like getting his brother to do drugs is sort of like one of his pastimes, right, And I'm going to quote from a Vanity Fair article here. David Horowitz remembers Bobby being so cavalier that he cut lines of cocaine for his brother Michael Kennedy and allowed him to snort a line in front of the rider.
Only then did he introduce Horowitz as a reporter. Horowitz also recalls that Kennedy asked him for a ride to Harlem to score trucks. Shits like you're in front of a reporter, man, you and your brother, you don't think any of this is going to get reported on that you guys are doing cocaine.
I mean it seems like maybe he thought it was funny, right.
Yeah, this is the brother.
This is the brother he completely fucked with on acid.
I think this is a different brother.
This is a different brother. Okay.
Yeah, there's a lot of Kennedy brothers. It's hard for me to keep track from sometimes. Yeah, but this is a different brother. So Bobby takes the bar exam and fails it in nineteen eighty three and he has to he resigns from office not long after that. He is clearly in a downward spiral at this point, and shortly after failing the bars, he's taking a flight, you know, he's always flying, jetting around everywhere. Did he ever pass the bar eventually? Yeah, he gets he gets barred. He
gets barred. Uh not not on xanax. That might have helped him out. But he passes the bar because.
It's a very very very very difficult test.
Yeah, I don't know, Sophie. Uh, it seems like he passed it eventually. Uh So maybe it's not that sick, So maybe it's not that hard.
It's not that hard pass the bar.
Could pass the bar. That's that's what kills it. Puffeting Bobby through the bar exam of course, son of a bitch, used up all his energy. Oh man, So he's he's on one of his many flights. I think he's heading to North Dakota for some goddamn reason. And as is usual, Yeah, he's doing a lot of drugs and.
He got word like there's a pile of rotting meat there.
They call it the corpse capital of America.
They do, they do.
Yeah, So he's he's gets sick, dope sick. He's like, I think, well, not dope sick. That's when you don't have heroin. He gets sick because he does too much heroin in the bathroom of a plane that has stopped in Rapid City. That because he's sick. I think he's odeed.
Like that's indeed, Yeah, that's what getting sick from too much heroin is, right.
Yeah, I think he basically o d's in the bathroom of this plane and they have to divert the flight to Rapid City because Kennedy is now on.
The Virgin of death and another one, folks, oh ship another Kennedy's going down.
It's bad, bad, luck to be a Kennedy on a plane.
Such bad luck any way, Like there's no there's no wrong end to that sentence.
No, no, you're right there. So they have to divert the flight, and they as they're treating him, they search him and they find heroin on him. Right, so he gets arrested in charge. He has, you know, been caught in possession of heroin on a fucking flight. Bobby gets ultimately sentenced to just two years of probation and community service. Because again Kennedy, and this is the start of him seeking treatment for his drug issues. He does actually get
better on that at this point. You know, he is able to like get sober and stay that way not long after this. Yeah, so that's good. That's good.
Sober like from heroin or is like sober.
I think he's just sober. I don't know, maybe he has some champagne now and again, but I think he's basically yeah, he seems like he does. That's that's at least what the reporting you will read on this says, I have no reason to doubt the matter. We will talk about what he I think he replaces due place.
That's always the question.
Yeah, that's that's your place to come up. But you know, the internet's not around yet. So yeah, So the time and access that Bobby and Michael Kennedy had given David Horowitz and his author Collier would create another calamity for Bobby The next year, in nineteen eighty four, an excerpt from the book The Kennedys was published in Playboy as
part of a pr blitz. Michael, who had struggled the most personally as a result of the drug addictions that he had accumulated with Bobby, became the black sheep of the Kennedy family overnight because he broke amerta right, like, he's you're not supposed to talk about this shit with outsiders, and he had talked about how fucked up the family was to these outside reporters. So they exile Michael basically, right.
Yeah, you're not allowed to we know, we see, Yeah, what's going on? Like you can't Yeah, you can't admit that you know that you're fucked up?
How dare you talk about it? Yeah? I'm going to quote from an article in Vanity Fair. Here. The time and access that Bobby and David Kennedy had given David Horowitz and his co author Collier would create another calamity for Bobby the next year. In nineteen eighty four, an excerpt from the book The Kennedys was published in Playboy. As a result of a pr blitz, David, who had struggled the most personally as a result of the drug addictions he'd accumulated with Bobby, became the black sheep of
the Kennedy family. Over at night. He has given away all of these secrets that you're not supposed to tell outsiders about the family. You're not supposed to let them in to the inside Kennedy stuff, right, you know, we know what's going on here, but you don't tell other people. So David has broken Omerta here. And I'm going to quote again from Vanity Fair to talk about what happens next.
The family turned on David Kennedy for airing the family's addiction secrets, and he stayed in a separate hotel during a family gathering in Palm Beach, Bobby, David had told the books authors was our last illusion. The next day, David died of an overdose at age twenty eighth. So we're down another Kennedy.
Yeah, Yeah, they just can't got your break other than being like naturally wealthy and powerful. They caught that break, caught that break.
It turns out there are other breaks that you need to catch to be a happy person.
And it turns out those that kind of yes, yes, that's very sad.
Yeah, it's a real bummer, and this is not you know, it's not a miss to look at what happens to him as another chapter in the long history of the Kennedy curse. But that curse seemed to skip Bobby over, and the tragic death of David helped to catalyze the need for him to commit to sobriety. So he starts attending AA meetings and within a few years he's found a cause to throw himself and the weight of his
Kennedy name behind, an environmental charity called river Keeper. Now Bobby gets a lot of praise for his involvement with river Keeper. This is legitimately some of the best stuff he does in his life. I should note at the top of this that he gets involved with river Keeper in the first place because he has fifteen hundred hours of community service. So it's you wouldn't say that he just like found this because he was looking for meaning in his life. He is legally required to.
He was doing something for something to fill that.
Yeah, Courton Manda. Now look that doesn't mean he didn't do good things there, but it's just useful context.
Well, let me ask you this. The time he spent with them, was it the mandated the amount of time, and that was it.
He does keep it. He just keep working with me. He should get He doesn't get no credit for what he does with this this organization.
It was more like, Okay, the impetus to do this was this, and yeah, you'll go to present how you find it's how he found the place. But he liked it and joined it and kept doing himself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now you know he's working as an environmental lawyer now and he's also kind of the figurehead of the organization. And in that in that role, Bobby attacks corporate polluters and he's he's actually very successful in helping to exact a real cost from big, big business bad actors. In this capacity, he plays a major role in forcing GM, forcing GM to pay one point seven billion dollars to clean up pollution their factories had
washed into the Hudson River. And that's that's a real penalty right there, and you know you're actually, yeah, a slap on the wrist. You notice a missing one point seven billion in the ballance sheet.
Yeah, the bee makes a big difference. Usually it's God, it's usually so much less than that.
It's usually way less than that. Usually it's like the amount.
They're like, well, we can do this because we're just gonna have to pay this, and that's fine, We're still gonna make Yeah.
Yes, now you're doing some damage at that point. Bobby and his partner at River Keeper also succeeded in going after Exxon, and in his speeches and writing around this time, Bobby fits pretty seamlessly into the narrative of a left leaning environmental crusader going after conservative polluters. Right he is. He is the lefty little guy, you know, standing up and fighting for the environment against the bad dudes from Ferngully. Right,
Like that's that's that's where he slots in at this point. Right. In a book Bobby co authored, he complains about right wing stereotypes about environmental elitism and the monopolization of resources for cat by special interests. Al Gore writes the forward of his book, so you can see him pretty firmly on like the liberal lefty side, you might even say, like progressive left right side of the podicle equation here, right.
Yeah, that aggressive against corporations for these kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, it's.
Yeah, it's weird how we got from there to hear where we are today, But this is where he is at the time.
Yeah, so that trajectually makes sense to me still, but you know.
It does, it does. He's actually an important role part of that whole national trajectory changing for a lot of people. As the nineties gave way to the two thousands, he was one of the most prominent dims on the East Coast and widely seen as a potential candidate for higher office. Bobby like flirted with the idea of running for election, but he never quite managed to make anything happen. And you get writing from his like in one of the books I read about him from twenty fifteen, you hear
from like people who care about Bobby. Thank god he didn't get into politics, like we were really worried he was going to. And I'm just so glad he's never run for president, you know.
Yeah. Yeah, that's if you can give advice to any Kennedy. It would be, don't run for president.
Don't get into politics, don't get into politics, stay off planes.
Yeah, stay plans politics and a new rule I would say for Kennedy's, uh, stay clear of rancid meat.
Avoid meat. Yeah, probably heroin too.
Probably heroin too. Yeah, just general, just general advice that weirdly applies also to specifically the Kennedy's. Yeah. But that's good. I mean, it's good to find your place in some you know, a position where like you feel like you're doing something and a difference and you have meaning, but you're not necessarily in politics and that in that way, so good for him.
For a while, while Bobby seemed to be a model for recovery and a human repost against the notion that the Kennedys were doomed, the family curse continued. His cousin William Kennedy Smith, had been tried for but acquitted of rape. In the early nineteen nineties, His other brother Michael was revealed to be sleeping with an underage person working as his babysitter, and then Michael died in a skiing accident
and aspen in nineteen ninety seven. His older brother Joseph's ex wife wrote a tell all memoir about him that scuttled his bid for the governor's chair in Massachusetts. And then in nineteen ninety nine, John F. Kennedy Junior, believed by many to be the future president, crashed his plane into the ocean near Martha's vineyard. The nineties are rough for the Kennedys. You know, the sixties were bad.
Jesus, some of those I yeah, just didn't You don't even absorb them all, you know, you're like, oh, yeah, Like jfk. Junior is like the big one that you think of when you think of the nineties and Kennedys. But like, damn, that's so much. Yeah, I assume we want to talk about babysitters a little bit later.
We are going to talk about babysitters. But you can see how by like two thousand you could you could think Bobby's the one the curse skipped over, right, Like he's doing a lot, like compared to the rest of his family. Yeah, he had that little brush with heroin, but he got over it. Well, yeah, he's really doing great. He's over in the seventies. Yeah, yeah, he's been over it for a while. He's doing something that matters in the world. You know, he's doing great. Yeah, he is
not doing great, that is all. There's more going on under the surface than you would want to say, and we'll get back to that. But first, Cody, you know, it also has more going on than you'd guess.
Wow, my guess is either products and services or the stuff that I do online.
Yeah, yeah, both of those things. Products and Cody's here, they are. We're back. So we talked a little earlier about Martha Moxley, who was bludgeon to death with a golf club by somebody in nineteen seventy five. Michael Skakel, a Kennedy cousin, was blamed because they found one of his family's golf clubs by the scene and he had
been around there. Now, the evidence linking him to this crime isn't great, right, Like I think it's it's there's enough there that I think it's likely he did it, but it's not in court terms, especially when you have Kennedy money, it's not perfect. Right. He is, however, eventually brought to trial. It takes a long time. He's brought to trial and found guilty in two thousand and two.
I'm gonna say it takes a long time, and he goes on to serve eleven years of a twenty year sentence.
Now, one of the major pieces of evidence in favor of conviction was that Skagell had attended the Alan School, subject of a recent of a bTB episode. This is one of those like troubled teen boarding schools where you send your kids to be hideously abused.
Right, yeah, yep, yeah, yeah, that's the description of those schools.
Yeah, we did two episodes on the Elan schools. Michael Is said people who went to school with him were like, he admitted to the murder during group. We would have these group sessions where we talk about the bad stuff we did. And for most because it's like I smoked pot, you know, in my parents' golf house or whatever, and with him, he's like, yeah, I beat a lady to death with a golf club. It's not funny. It's just the Kennedy's are so much extra than everyone else.
Yeah, No, like there's a uh, there's a dark laugh that you can you can Jesus Crest like what yeah, but like what a horrific It's it's like a it's off place to be like.
Yeah, God, yeah, so that all comes out. He gets convicted in two thousand and two, and as soon as he gets convicted, r FK Junior, who is again at this point looks like the hero at Kennedy, bounds onto the scene trying to defend his cousin by attacking the witnesses in a very Trumpian fashion and also in a fashion that's going to become increasingly associated with Bobby Kennedy Junior. He embraces a conspiracy theory.
Just like imagine RFK outside like the houses of the witnesses, with like his hawk in the darkness, just like you see the silhouette, and these start to smell like is that ranso and meat smell.
Of hundreds of caws?
Is that rant? And the answer is yes, yes, sorry.
So he in what's gonna increasingly become a thing for him. He embraces a conspiracy theory. And in this specific conspiracy theory, it's that Martha had been murdered not by his cousin,
but by a group of black men. And I'm going to quote from the New York Times in two thousand and three, Getano Bryant, a former classmate of mister Skygull and a cousin of the basketball star Kobe Bryant, came forward with information that he and the two teenagers had been in the exclusive Bell Haven section of Greenwich on October thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, the night of the murder. Mister Bryant said that he had left early, but the other two stayed behind and told him they want to
attack a girl man style. Both men have denied any involvement, and prosecutors have called accusations against them baseless. I am dead certain they did it, mister Kennedy said in an interview in Bedford. But people should read up the facts and meet and make up their own mind. So, yeah, Kobe Bryant's family gets into the gets in the case.
I should note that this guy claims to be Kobe Bryant's cousin.
Oh right, not really? Oh yeah's fake cousin.
Yeah I should, I should, because I was like, wait a second, I think this might be that guy. Sure, he claims to be the cousin. I don't know if you guy. So there's as asterisk no confirmation.
He claims he was with these guys who said basically said we're going to brutally murder a white woman.
Right, Like, what are you doing, Bobby? What is this?
Like?
Yeah? Like what the fuck?
When Like when Bobby says, like, look at the facts, what is he referring to? Like what just like the what are the facts that he's referring to? Just that they were in town?
Yeah? Yeah, what what counts as the facts in this case? So was it their golf club?
Bobby, golf club's even more than your cousin.
Now caveman style, what if he says that talks like that fucking freak.
Yeah, Kennedy writes to defend his cousin. He gets to because he's a Kennedy. He gets to write an article for The Atlantic. If you want to know how reliable the Atlantic can be, And it's it's a crazy long article like he writes, basically a goddamn novella for the fucking Atlantic, in which he throws out baseless allegations to defend his blood at the expense of victims and their families.
To continue from The New York Times. In addition to implicating the two teenagers in the murder, mister Kennedy suggests involvement by others. They include the Scaygow family's former tutor, Kenneth w Lyttleton, who was granted immunity in exchange for testimony and had long been a suspect, and Missus Moxley's older brother, John Moxley, now fifty seven, who's account of his whereabouts the night of the murder varied considerably over
the years, mister Kennedy wrote. In separate phone interviews this week, Dorotha Moxley, Missus Moxley's eighty four year old mother, said the book had left her at a loss for words, adding that she had never seen the truth so twisted and manipulated in my entire life. She added that she still believed that mister Skagel was the one who swung the club. So yeah, he's reopened to wound for this lady, you could say.
Yeah, yeah, very publicly and aggressively. Is is the implication that like these guys did the murder and then like these other people he's talking about covered it up. I think the implication is it like they did it, like he seems to be accusing like a bunch of different unrelated people of this.
Yeah, of like so like whatever theory wanting to hide it, I don't understand why what the theory would be?
Right, Okay, right, Like it's it's something happens a lot with this stuff. We talked alluded briefly to the uh Trump assassination attempt, but like stuff like that where there are always these like people jumping to conclusions of like, oh, it's this conspiracy this or this this. I'm always like, but what is what is the theory that you're saying, like you're pointing to like this person and this person in this like event, but like, what do you think happened?
That's that That's always what you should ask yourself with conspiracies, and it doesn't always like it's part of why I think some conspiracy theories it's not unreasonable to buy into to a degree. Right, Is there a logical line you could draw on why someone would want JFK dead? Why the CIA would have wanted to make sure that's a you can you have a theory there with a motivation?
Right?
Is there a logical reason why people would have wanted Jeffrey Epstein murdered? Yes, you don't have to like, you don't have to explain, right.
Right, Yeah, Yeah, And those lots those are lines are very clear, but you know, like a like see people say like they tried to kill Trump? Who's they? Who are you talking about? Like what do you mean why would they do it this way?
If it's from this but like Trump and he didn't even benefit from.
It, like right, and like yeah, it's like just so many things like that where I'm like, but what do you mean?
Are you saying Trump had a man shoot past his ear? Did he blade himself like a wrestler?
Did they want to spook him? Like they got this kid who sucks at shooting, and like like what do you what is your what do you think happened?
Yeah, like what do you think happened? That is likelier than a twenty year old with an ar fifteen did something crazy?
Like yeah, Like I just don't know what they're saying happened. And this is another example of that where it's like you're just saying like throwing all the stuff out, but like if you look at all the pieces, who's.
Involved fits, they don't fit. There's nothing that makes this fit together. I don't know why, right, Like yeah, now, what I will say makes sense in this case is Bobby's obsession with being Michael, because Michael is one of the members of the family who's stuck by him after he got busted for drugs and helped him get sober.
And I get that that's painful, Bobby, but your cousin probably murdered a young woman, and by backing him and attacking the people trying to get him keep him in prison, Bobby has laid a clear line against the family of a victim. Yeah, and it's interesting Vanity fair Wrights quote. Bobby was the only Kennedy to defend Scackle, showing up twice to the Connecticut courtroom. Theories at a bound about why Kennedy felt compelled to defend Scackle, including speculation that
Scackle was blackmailing him. According to one of Kennedy's diaries obtained by The New York Post, he thought his cousin was delusional and paranoid, even as he publicly maintained that Scackle was innocent of the murder. So maybe Bobby is just doing this for his own skin. Maybe there's some darkness, and we have an idea of what that darkness might be.
As Bobby starts to get accused by more women of sexual harassment, made his cousin knew something about him, and it's like, look, you use your juice, your your pr juice to try and get me out of this, or I will ruin your life that you've carefully built back up right, I'll tell people the real Bobby.
Yeah, Like yeah, I mean there's already like all the stuff we do know is fucked up.
It's yeah, there's a lot that as it is.
Yeah, And he's like alluded many times to like I've got like millions of.
Skeletons, skeletons in my closet and like, you know, I got more skeletons than that rotting corpse pit.
Yeah, exactly, And I believe me. I got at I know, skeletons. If you need you need some? Do you need some? Sorry side question, but do you need some rotting meat? Because I have some? Do you want?
Who trunks full of it?
Like it's funny you bring up rotting meat, because I've got a lot of it for you. I just can't give it away. I can't.
There's no room in the fridge room in.
My friend fridges.
Oh Kennedy money and Bobby's tireless legal advocacy eventually did pay dividends in twenty thirteen, after about a decade behind bars, his conviction was overturned on technical grounds. In twenty eighteen, the Connecticut Supreme Court confirmed that he had received insufficient legal representation. A new trial was ordered, but the prosecution chose to cut bait and he was not put back
in or charged again. So I don't know where you want to apportion that blame wise, because I think there's a chance he really believed that he was freeing an innocent man. But I don't know, maybe not probably in the evil column probably, Yeah.
No, No, I know, it's weird. I mean it's weird how aggressive he was about it, and his again, like his defense is weird, like his defense and like his explanation of the alternative is like odd. So I don't know.
Yeah, well, we'll see. Well, I don't know. We won't see. Maybe we'll never know the answer.
We won't see.
The YaST thing we're going to talk about is a clearer mark in the bad guy column. I'll say that. In late nineteen ninety eight, the Kennedy's hired day babysitter, twenty three year old Eliza Cooney. She was interested in working as an environmental activist, and basically the idea is this will be part of your internship effectively, like I will teach you can shadow me, you can like learn how to do what I do as this powerful and
beloved environmental lawyer. But I need you to watch my kids, right, you know, not a bad trade as these things go. But unfortunately Bobby doesn't really have any plan to give her to mentor her, right, That's how he frames this, like I need someone to watch my kids and I'll mentor you.
That's not what I mean, that's what you assume. Like that's not I think, you know, Okay, I get to watch the Kennedy's kids whatever, But like that's not like a legit deal or situation or like there's not like that's already a shady yeah but yes thing to yes, move over, Like by the way, what like that's weird.
Yeah. So basically she comes over there having a meeting with another person at Riverkeeper, and like as they're sitting around the table talking business, she feels Kennedy's hand moving up and down her leg under the table, and she you know, one of the she talks because she has recently come out to that journalist at Vanity Fair, and she sends him like a copy of her diary with an entry date in November seventh, nineteen ninety eight, where
she writes, from everything everybody says about the Kennedy's and their babysitters, they had me worried, like I have to watch out, be careful. And the other night in the kitchen with Murray, who's one of the other river keepers, I could have sworn he was touching my leg in hand. It seems like he thought I was somebody else or wasn't paying attention, Like he would come to every once in a while and snap out of it, or I would move away. It was like he was on something
or really tired, or was missing Mary, or was testing me. Now, Cooney hopes in vain at first that this is some bit right. He's just exhausted. He just kind of reached for me. He wasn't really thinking it through. But just a week later she walked in to see her boss standing in her bedroom reading her diary, which was open next to the bed and filled with notes on her
romantic life with her boyfriend. The harassment continued after this, and she is shocked at one point when a shirtless forty five year old Bobby Kennedy asks him to rub lotion on his back. She thinks, isn't you know Mary, your wife home, doesn't she do this for you? But she agrees She like rubs him down, even though she feels like it's inappropriate, because what else is she going to do. She's alone with the man, and she stops writing about her experiences after this point because she knows
that he's coming in and reading her diary. Really yeah, yeah, yeah, but she says, they continue. I'm gonna quote from Vanity Fair here. A few months later, Cooney says she was rifling through the kitchen pantry for lunch after a yoga class, still in her sports bra and leggings, when Kennedy came up behind her, blocked her inside the room, again, groping her, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them up
along her rib cage and breasts. My back was to the door of the pantry and he came up behind me, she says, describing the alleged sexual assault. I was frozen, shocked, and yeah, that's bad. So that's Bobby Kennedy Part three. Sorry on such a bleak note, disgusting.
Well that's so gross. You'll get more many reasons it's also like, not the one time, it's not the one person that you would have.
His response makes clear.
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. That's gross.
What a gross motherfucker.
You know what's not gross? You're pluggables.
Oh good, So, speaking of nothing we just talked about. Uh, Hi, find me offline. I host a show called some More News. You can watch on YouTube and listen to it as a podcast. We've got a podcast called even More News. My band is called the Hot Shapes. You can find us on SoundCloud or buy our album Laverne on bandcamp. I'm on websites as doctor mister Cody X.
Yeah. Yeah, it's gonna give it to you a bad time.
Yeah, Robert, I'd like to plug Cools of Media's newest podcast.
We have a podcast.
I mean you're currently on one, but yes, we have many podcasts, but we have a brand new one that has the trailer out right now, and it's called Weird Little Guys and it's hosted by Molly Conger.
Do you want to tell the people about it, Robert?
Uh. Yeah. Basically Molly is the best researcher I know, and she obsessively trawls the internet court records. Uh, for very weird little guys. These are. These are like little strange Nazi freaks, businessmen, running cons, all sorts of like tiny evil people who you're not going to hear about from anybody else. Like what they do mostly stays locked into like local small claims cases or weird little corners
of the internet. But these are some of the some of the craziest people in stories that you'll ever hear about. So check out Weird Little Guys.
Taylor trailers out now.
Sounds amazing, zerop one on August eighth.
August eighth, I was, I was like, uh, it sounds like basically like d like f tier local Jacob Walls.
Yeah, these are like the weird little guys that.
Like they just don't get that sort of national Most of.
Them I've never heard of, but they're like trying to ruin our lives.
Yeah, what a great show that I haven't listened to yet that I love already. The Best pays the Best and we'll be back.
With part four so soon, Robert any any final thoughts?
Uh No, I think that's it.
Well bye.
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