Behind the Bastards - Part Three: The RFK Jr. Episodes

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Robert and Cody discuss RFK Jr's days as a professional rat-eater and explorer, and then things get weird.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

AllZone Media. Oh, what's cold might open it. Well, that doesn't sound very good at all. Cody, come on in here. Help me out with this. I feel 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 showdy. Behind the bastards, a podcast, bad people. Thank you, to tell you all about them. Cody, it has been an eventful news week. since we started the RFK Jr. episodes?

It really has. Yeah. I didn't realize that until we hopped on again. How much it truly happened since last we recorded. I was like, hey, Cody, remember when we recorded the day before former President Trump had an assassination attempt on his life? It was the day before. And then it kept going. The news just kept going.

Yeah, the news kept going. It was attempted assassination attempt. R&C. Who, J.D. Vance. What a weird guy. Yeah, Jady Vance. Fuck the couch.

All the, all the hits. Then it was Jovid, and then it was Jover. And now we're here. Kamala awakening. Now it's the Kamal new age. I don't know.

Yeah, the K-Hive's glorious return, I guess. What a wild time. So I don't know. We'll see what next week brings. Who knows? 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

just like mind-dulling shock is a guy who has been going through it longer than we have. R.FK Jr. Junior. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. I sat down to write these episodes, basically when I was on the plane to the RNC, right after Trump had been 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 Jr. 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? Yeah, assassination attempts, I think, just make you think of Kennedy's. Right, right, obviously. Right, 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 1968 that this whole election has, where it's like, it's a lot like 68, but not.

It's so interesting how it's so like it, but so not. Yeah. Mostly, I thought of RFK Jr. because the whole sordid business was clear, like everything that happened to Trump, like everything detailed that's come out about the Corey Comparatore, the guy who died instead of Trump. 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 sense and sensibility that you have to endure not only as 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 a hidden razor like a wrestler.

And then on the right wing side, obviously people immediately decided to blame the female secret service agents on Trump's team. because DEI, right. Really, really America. You mean the women after he was already shot at? Yeah, after he was shot at. Yes, yes. Solid point, Shody. 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 in 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 are in the process of coping with this and we're doing mixed jobs of it. But RFK Jr. has spent his entire life pretty much in this space, right? For him, reality fractured back in 1968, 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 we're not. unhealthy. You know, he leaned into his hobbies, even if they are crazy rich guy hobbies. Yeah, like I was going to say, like, yeah, he leaned into his hobbies. Describe the hobbies first before. They're baffling, yeah, they're unhinged hobbies, but they are hobbies. It's true. Hobbies are important. 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 PT109. 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 1974, before Bobby began his junior year at Harvard, Lim Billings proposed that they explore the very isolated and dangerous a Pura Mac River in southern Peru, an adventure that Billings 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? Like 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 rodent'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. Mommy, what are you doing? What is this? What is this life? Just like, what a sicko. What a sicko. He's not even a weirdo. He's a sicko.

It's like, yeah. Baffling? 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 escaped here and you've gone sideways to just this other world that is, uh, well, did it cure his 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 going to 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 brain worm. They were just like, probably getting in there, we're going to put this in your brain. Yeah, we're going to live on this. The river eating rat eyes. Yeah, like voluntarily getting a fucking brainworm put in your skull. America will love you, Bobby, if you live on the river and eat rat eyes.

Some Americans will. It's so funny. So they brought with them on this journey down the river in Peru, a variable 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 opiate 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 should have saved them for emergencies. That's what he was doing, but the thing is a 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 unsettling.

It's like in the dark with a reporter. It's being like, no, eat the rat slowly. Eat it 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, that makes it worse. That makes it so much worse. You're ruining him. You're destroying this man.

This is like the most brain damage I can imagine. I can imagine giving him a young man. Just like popping him full of drugs and calling him Jack. Like, that's not good for him. Doing a heart of darkness to turn him into his uncle. God. What are you excited?

I can. Just like, no chance this guy. No fucking chance. Now, you got to 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 Jr. looking hot on the river, like a little adventurer, that it draws the attention of a forward-thinking TV executive

who 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 an Ails kind of guy? It's Roger Ailes. It's literally Roger Ails.

It is. It most of 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 in the whole 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 TVN, a prototype conservative news network funded by the air to the Coors Beer, fortune. This all culminated in a TV show, their relationship, Ailes and Bobby's, on a TV show about Bobby's next adventure.

Rat boy on the river. No, they were going to put him in Africa. They were going to do a safari in Africa with Bobby Kennedy Jr. 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. 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.

He told this to Ailes 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 that's his attitude at this point in his life, right? Sure. I mean, I appreciate his position on like 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 scene. And knowing like I'm like Kennedy got out of these advantages and privileges and stuff. I should use them to help people. Right. Right on. You should maybe talk to somebody other than Roger Ailes. Maybe I'll talk to Roger Ailes about this.

You may not going to get a help. But you get where he comes from here. You also get where this can lead in toxic directions, right? Because like the idea that, you know, to whom much is given, much is owed, there's a degree of sense in that. But it also leads to this no bless 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 didn't 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 rancid meat. Like, yeah.

This isn't like, he's not cosplaying as a weirdo who does this. Right. Yeah. He does, he does come by the eating bushmeat honestly. Bush meat and morphine. Yeah. That's, that's, that's his breakfast of champions. Yeah, he's not, you know, there's no pretending there.

That's just 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 1975, while he is entering his 20s 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? There 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, 15-year-old Martha Moxley. And I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times here. Martha Moxley, 15, 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 teenager'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, 17, 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 Skackle family. Thomas and another young man are considered suspects, though both pass 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 1975, 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, went 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 cinched 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 1976, 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 when my dad was in charge, they all seem to be very racist now. What could have possibly happened? How do we solve for this? There's no political theory about that. No, no, no. No one's 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 attach 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 he's too busy hawk towing. Oh, God. What? Go.

Hawk. Sophie. Sophie, that that joke was relevant two weeks ago. We've moved on past that. I'm still at the restaurant, which is a joke you don't also get. That was at least, that was one attempted assassination ago. Yeah, that was one attempted presidential assassination ago. We're past it.

I wonder if the Hawk Tooie girl had something to do with shooting Trump. Not impossible. Not impossible. Yeah. Yeah, because we know she's a Biden stand now. But Robert. Check on my blog. 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 me that it might be time for ads. We are back. So, RFK, you know, 1976 does his thesis. And it's going to be a couple years later after 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 1980 is his Uncle Ted's re-election campaign. David Horowitz, future co-writer of the book The Kennedys, was with him for this, and even though Bobby had a girlfriend at the time, Horowitz later wrote, quote, 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. 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 100 fever and looked really ill and was hoarse. 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 friend 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 because he saw it as part of the myth, like his dad and his uncle are both these

famous philanderers. And he's like, 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 um, I mean, he's trying to do that. Yeah, he's a new Jack city here.

Yeah. So Bobby also keeps using heroin heavily alongside Limbillings. Horowitz recalled that during Ted's campaign, they would drink heavily. And like, one of the things they would do because there's no laws for Kennedys, 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 sounds like a challenge.

Yeah. Try and stop me. Try and stop me and if you have any issue with my behavior, then you're out. You're cut off from the Kennedys. And nobody wants to be cut off from the Kennedys. That's the most exciting thing you can be connected to.

Yeah. God, it's like, so much is like torn with all these stories. I'm like, that's like pretty cool. But also like, don't do that. Like,

come on. Like, yeah, but also like, don't do that. And obviously like, you could have killed somebody. Right.

Like, it's just like scumbagged rich kid behavior. Right. But it's funny. You get why Ted Kennedy had a chap, 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. You're used to Kennedy's dying. You're like, yeah, we've got so many. Yeah, we've got plenty of Kennedys. Horowitz describes Bobby's heroin use this time,

at this 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 heroin and talk about the fact that you're going to be the next Jack. I promise. You're just going to be like, God. Lim was doing, I love the way Horowitz writes this, Lim was doing heroin with Bobby and shooting delusions up his ass that he would be president one day.

Wow. That's like, he's on heroin, but the real heroin is his uncle's legacy. Right, right. The words of encouragement are the real dog. Yeah, never encourage 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 Milbrook in the pit of rotting carcasses there, he continued to want to feed his hawk the grossest meat he could find. Oppenheimer writes,

he had built an outdoor cage on Dempsey's property to house his falcon, but he also chose to feed it disgusting roadkill that he stored in Dempsey's home refrigerator. We tried to encourage him to buy chickens for this purpose, but we weren't too successful. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? Like, like, this. He just loves roadkill. This fucking roadkill, hot like dead rotting flesh thing is so fucking weird, man.

Like, of all the things. I'm going to put in their family refrigerator these people 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. Yeah. Like in this aggressive way. Like it just has gotten, it's too far. It's too much at a certain age.

Like I know like, all these people are dying. You know, and like, you're processing death with this. Go to the rotting flesh pit, fine. But to carry that for so long and give it to everybody around him. He just loves it. What's going on? You can buy it. another refrigerator, man. What is 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 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 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, oh, I assume for a few weeks, yeah, and I'll be back and then it just creates problems.

It's very weird. I want to read another quote from Oppenheimer. Well, he had taught the Dempsey's 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.

Anyone around him. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also like, it's not weird. Again, he's like this, yeah, I'm sorry, you fucked up kid in his fucked up family. But it seemed like at least at the 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'll 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 way. That's all I got. Gotta have something. It's like, again, it's like, yeah, 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 never, Bobby always lets it go well past the point where it would be healthy. He's putting roadkill in his. Friends Refrigerators. That's the line.

That's the line, 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 got. It's wild. Yeah. There's no way he even wants to do that. Yeah, he's an assistant DA now.

What are you doing? No. 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 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 writer. Only then did he introduce Horowitz as a reporter. Horowitz also recalls that Kennedy asked him for a ride to Harlem to scorn. trucks. These a piece of shit. Like, you're in front of a reporter, man. You and your brother, and 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, he definitely thinks it's funny. This is the brother he completely fucked with on acid, right? I think this is a different brother. Different brother. Yeah, this is a different brother. So he's just a shit brother.

Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of Kennedy brothers. It's hard for me to keep track from sometimes. But yeah, but this is a different brother. So Bobby takes the bar exam and fails it in 1983 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 bar

He's he's taking a flight, you know he's always flying jetting around everywhere Does he ever pass the bar? Eventually, yeah, he gets he gets barred Not on Xanax that might have helped him out but he passes the bar. Because it's a very very very very very very difficult test. Yeah. I don't know, Sophie.

It seems like he passed it eventually. So maybe it's not that hard. I think so. Maybe it's not that hard. If a worm can pass the bar. Maybe a worm can pass the bar. That's what killed his puffeting Bobby through the bar exam. Poor son of a bitch used up all his energy.

Oh, man. So he's on one of his many flights. I think he's heading to North Dakota for some goddamn reason. And as as usual, yeah, he's doing a lot of drugs. And he gets sick. He got word like there's a pile of rotting meat there. A lot of corpses in North Dakota. They call it the corpse capital of America.

They do. They do. Yeah. So he 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.

Is that a plane has to stop because he's sick? Or just like sickness? I think he's OD'd. Like that's what, yeah, that's what getting sick from too much heroin is, right? An overdose? Yeah, I think he basically ODs in the bathroom of this plane and they have to divert the flight to Rapid City because Kennedy is now on the verge of death.

I got another one, folks. Oh shit, another Kennedy's going down. It's bad, bad luck to be. be a Kennedy on a plane. Such bad luck. Drive everywhere. You could have finished that sentence anyway. 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 and charged. 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. That's good.

Yeah, so that's good. That's good. Is it sober like sober 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 straight. He kicks the drugs.

Yeah. He seems like he does. 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. Replaces it. Yeah, that's always the question. Yeah, that's, that'll 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 co-author, Collier, would create another calamity for Bobby the next year. In 1984, 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 a murder, right? Like 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, we know what's going on with us. Yeah, you can't admit that you know that you're fucked up.

How dare you talk about it? 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 1984, 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 overnight.

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 book's authors, was our last illusion. The next day, David died of an overdose at age 28.

So we're down another Kennedy. Yeah. Yeah. They just can't catch a break, other than being, like, not really wealthy and powerful. They caught that break pretty solidly. They caught that break. It turns out there are other breaks that you need to catch to be a happy person. Turns out that break kind of exacerbates other breaks.

catch it. 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 Riverkeeper. Now, Bobby gets a lot of praise for his involvement with Riverkeeper. 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 Riverkeeper in the first place because he has 1,500 hours of community service.

So you wouldn't say that he just, like, found this because he was looking for meaning in his life. He was legally required to do something. He was looking for something to fill that. Yeah. Court mandated. 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 amount of time and that was it? No, no, no. He does keep working with them. He doesn't get no credit for what he does with this organization. It was more like, okay, the impetus to do this was this. Yeah, you'll go to prison if you don't. It's how he found the place, but he liked it and joined it and kept doing it and so.

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 role, Bobby attacks corporate polluters. And he's actually very successful in helping to exact a real cost from big business bad actors. In this capacity, he plays a major role in forcing GM to pay $1.7 billion to clean up pollution their factories had washed into the Hudson River. And that's a real penalty right there. You're not talking about a slap on the wrist.

you notice a missing $1.7 billion in the ballot sheet. Yeah, the B makes a big difference. Usually it's, God, it's usually so much less than that. It's usually way less than that. It's usually like $40. Usually it's like the amount, they're like, well, we can do this because we're just going to have to pay this and that's fine. We're still going to make.

Yeah. Yeah. No, you're doing some damage at that point. Bobby and his partner at Riverkeeper 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 the lefty little guy, you know, standing up and fighting for the environment against

the bad dudes from Ferngoley, right? Like 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 cash 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 political equation here, right? Yeah, that aggressive against corporations for these kind of things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird how we got from there to here where we are today. But this is where he is at the time. Yeah. That actually makes sense to me still. But, you know, that's just, it does. It does.

He's actually an important role part of that whole national trajectory changing for a lot of people. As the 90s gave way to the 2000s, 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 2015, 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? That would be terrible.

That's, if you can give advice to any candidate, it would be don't run for president. Don't get into politics. Don't get into politics. Stay off planes. Yeah, stay up planes. Don't get to politics. And a new rule, I would say, for candidates,

stay clear of rancid meat. Avoid rancid meat. Just avoid rancid meat. Yeah. Avoid rancid meat. probably heroin too. Probably heroin too. Yeah.

Just general advice that weirdly applies also to specifically the Kennedys. 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 you're making a difference and you have meaning, but you're not necessarily in politics 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 1990s. 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 in Aspen in 1997. His older brother Joseph's ex-wife wrote a tell-all memoir about him that scuttled his bed for the governor's chair in Massachusetts. And then in 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., believed by many, to be the future president, crashed his plane into the ocean near Martha's Vineyard.

The 90s are rough for the Kennedys. You thought the 60s were bad. Jesus. Some of those, I, yeah, just didn't. You don't even absorb them all. You're like, oh, yeah, like, JFK Jr. is, like, the big one that you think of when you think of the 90s and the Kennedys. But, like, damn, that's so much.

Yeah. I assume we'll talk about babysitters a little bit later. We are going to talk about babysitters. But you can see how, by, like, 2000. And you could think Bobby's the one the curse skipped over, right? 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. Wow.

He got over it, yeah. He's really doing great. He got over it in the 70s. 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's 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 what 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 Codies. Here they are. We're back. So we talked a little earlier about Martha Moxley, who was bludgeoned to death with a golf club by somebody in 1975. 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 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 2002. I was going to say it took, yeah, it takes a long time.

And he goes on to serve 11 years, of a 20-year sentence. Now, one of the major pieces of evidence in favor of conviction was that Skakel had attended the Alon 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.

Yep. Yeah. That's the description of those schools. Yeah. We did two episodes on the Alon schools. Michael is said, people who went to school with him were like, he admitted to the murders 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 Kennedys are so much extra than everyone else. Oh, yeah. No, like there's a, there's a dark laugh that you can. Yeah. Jesus Christ.

Like, what? Yeah. But like, what a horrific. It's awful. Like place to be in light. Like, yeah. God. Yeah.

So that all comes out. He gets convicted in 2002. And as soon as he gets convicted, R.FK Jr., who is, again, at this point, looks like the hero at Kennedy, bounds on to 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, Jr. He embraces a conspiracy theory. Sorry. I'm just like imagining RFK outside like that. houses of the witnesses with like his hawk and like in the darkness, just like you see this

silhouette and he's got the hawk and like you start to smell like, is that rancid meat? You're smelling rancid meat in night. Is that the carcasses of hundreds of cows? Is that rancid meat, Cody? And the answer is yes. Sorry. So he, in what's going to 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 2003, Gittano Bryant, a former classmate of Mr. Skakel 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 30th, 1975, the night of the murder. Mr. Bryant said that he had left early, but the other two stayed behind and told him they wanted to attack a girl, caveman style. Both men have denied any involvement, and prosecutors have called accusations against them baseless. I am dead certain they did it, Mr. Kennedy said in an interview in Bedford, but people should read up the facts and make up their own mind. So yeah, Kobe Bryant's family gets into the case. I should note that this guy claims to be Kobe Bryant's cousin.

Oh, right. Not really. Oh, no. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I should. I should know.

Because I was like, wait a second. I think this might be that guy. surely not yeah he claims to be the cousin uh i don't know if he's been claimed back so there's asterisk asterisks no confirmation and 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 uh yeah and also like what the fuck when like when bobby says like look at the facts what is he referring to like what are the facts that he's referring to just that they were in town? Yeah. Yeah. What counts as the facts in this case? So,

Kennedy... Was it their golf club, Bobby? Like, what are you talking about? Golf clubs even more than your cousin? Now, caveman style. Shut up, Bobby. Who says that? He fucking talks like that. You 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 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, Mr. Kennedy suggests involvement by others. They include the Skakel family's former tutor, Kenneth W. Littleton, who was granted immunity in exchange for testimony and had long been a suspect. And Mrs. Moxley's older brother, John Moxley, now 57,

whose account of his whereabouts the night of the murder varied considerably over the years, Mr. Kennedy wrote. In separate phone interviews this week, Dortha Moxley, Mrs. Moxley's 84-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 Mr. Skakel was the one who swung the club. So he's reopened a wound for this lady, you can say? Yeah. Yeah. very publicly and aggressively 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 like is it like they did it like he seems to be accusing like a bunch of different unrelated people of this

yeah of like covering it up wanting to hide it I don't understand why what the theory would be, right? Okay, right. Like, it's something happens a lot with this stuff. We alluded briefly to the 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 to this or this, this. And 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 and this like event.

But like what do you think happened? 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 to someone why that might have happened, right? Right. Yeah. Um, yeah. Um, yeah. And those lines are very clear.

But, you know, like a, like, you see, 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? Who benefits from this, but like Trump and he didn't even benefit from it? 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 what do you what is your what do you think happened? Yeah What do you think happened that is likelier than a 20 year old with an AR 15 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 like throwing all the stuff out. But like if you look at all the pieces who's involved with this? 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 freeing Michael because

Michael is one of the, 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 writes, quote,

Bobby was the only Kennedy to defend Skackle, showing up twice to the Connecticut courtroom. Theories abound about why Kennedy felt compelled to defend Skackle, including speculation that Skackle 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 Skackle 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. Maybe his cousin knew something about him, and it's like, look, you use 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. The real thing, yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there's already, like, all the stuff we do know is fucked up. It's, yeah, there's a lot that's fucked up as it is. Yeah. And he's, like, alluded many times to, like, I've got, like, millions of skeletons in my closet. Like, you know, I got more skeletons than that fucking rotting corpse pit. Yeah, exactly. And believe me, I got a lot of roared in corpse meat. Believe me, I know skeletons.

Oh, a few needs. Do you need some? Do you need some? Yeah. Sorry, I know. Side question. But do you need some rotting meat? Because I have some.

Do you want? My whole trunk's full. of it. Like, it's funny you bring up rotting me because I've got a lot of it for you. I just can't give it away. There's no room in the fridge. The fridge is full of the rotting feet. No room in my friends' fridges. So Kennedy Money and Bobby's tireless legal advocacy eventually did pay dividends. In 2013, after about a decade behind bars, his conviction was overturned on technical grounds. In 2018, 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. it's no way to know. It's weird. I mean, it's weird how aggressive he was about it. And again,

like his defense is weird. Like his defense and like his explanation of the alternative is like odd. So. Yeah. We'll see. Well, I don't know. We won't see.

Maybe we'll never know the answer here. We won't. We won't see. The next thing we're going to talk about is a clearer mark in the bad guy column. I'll say that. In late 1998, the Kennedy's Highman. Day babysitter, 23-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 I, you assume, like, that's not a, I like, 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, like, but yes thing to. Yes.

Yeah. By the way, what, like, that's weird. Yeah. So basically, she comes over. They're 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 dated November 7, 1998, where she writes, from everything everybody says about the Kennedys 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 was one of the other riverkeepers, 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? Bobby'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 45-year-old Bobby Kennedy asks him to rub lotion on his back. She thinks, isn't, you know, marry 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 going in and reading her diary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she says they continue. I'm going to 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, and began 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 to end on such a bleak note.

Disgusting. Well, that's so gross. It'll get worse. For so many reasons. It's also like not the one time. It's not the one person that he would have behaved that way. His response makes that clear. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly, exactly. That's gross. What a sicko, gross motherfucker. You know what's not gross? Your plugables. Oh, good. So speaking of nothing we just talked about, hi, find me online.

I host a show called Some More News. You can watch it 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, band camp.

I'm on websites as Dr. Mr. Cody X. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to give it to you. Blue sky. It being a bad time. Yeah.

Robert, I'd like to plug Koolso 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? Yeah. Basically, Molly is the best researcher I know. And she obsessively trawls the internet court records for very weird little guys. 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 and stories that you'll ever hear about. So check out weird little guys coming here. Trailer's out now. Soonish. Sounds amazing.

Yeah. Ep zero, up one on August 8th. August 8th. I was like, it's. 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 like push from 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. Molly's the best. Molly's 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.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster,

hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.