For his part Dunne drew a pointed conclusion from Kennedy’s defense: “If you were to take Kennedy’s word that he knows his cousin as much as any human being alive,” he wrote, “and you believe Skakel murdered a girl at 15, the concluding logic isn’t so great for Bobby.”
Skakel had served 11 years of a 20-year sentence when, after years of appeals arguing that his lawyer had botched the defense, the conviction was vacated and Skakel was released pending a retrial (prosecutors opted not to bring it again). In 2016 Kennedy published a book defending Skakel called Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit. Kennedy pinned the murder of Martha Moxley on two teenagers from New York City, one black, the other multiracial, whom investigators had already discounted. Ghostwritten by reporter Andrew Goldman and published by Skyhorse Publishing, which also issues Kennedy’s anti-vaccine books, Kennedy’s book claimed to have solved the murder.
“I am dead certain they did it,” Kennedy told The New York Times. (Both men have denied committing the murder.)
Asked about Kennedy’s conclusions, Martha Moxley’s mother, Dorothy, said she had “never seen the truth so twisted and manipulated in my entire life.”
Kennedy conceded that his claims were “controversial.” “Anytime you do anything controversial, you lose constituents,” he told the Times. “You lose support because people have opinions.”
The book, hyped by Alan Dershowitz (also a Skyhorse author) and Bill O’Reilly, further buttressed Kennedy’s identity as a serial white knight jousting with the prevailing establishment, whether the justice system, corporate polluters, or the pharmaceutical industry—or later, President Biden, the Democratic National Committee, and his own family.
In 1994 Kennedy married Richardson, who had been Kerry Kennedy’s best friend since they attended Putney School in Vermont together. She and Bobby had four children, Conor, Kyra, Aidan, and Finn. In the fall of 1998, the Kennedys hired a 23-year-old woman, Eliza Cooney, as their part-time babysitter. She was a recent college graduate interested in working on environmental causes and had looked after Kerry’s and Max’s children in Hyannis Port that summer. Cooney moved into Bobby and Mary’s family home in Mount Kisco, New York, taking care of the kids and assisting Bobby at his environmental law clinic at Pace University during the week.
One night Cooney attended a meeting in the family kitchen with Kennedy and another young Riverkeeper volunteer named Murray Fisher to discuss business when she felt Kennedy’s hand moving up and down her leg under the table. She tried making sense of the incident in her diary, which I have read. In an entry dated November 7, 1998, she wrote:
“In the back of my mind, I was hoping it wasn’t what it actually was,” says Cooney, now 48. (Reached for comment, Fisher says he worked closely with Cooney and liked her, but wasn’t aware of her alleged experiences with Kennedy at the time, and feels bad for her.)
Weeks later, she discovered Kennedy standing in her bedroom. She saw that her diary, which chronicled her daily activities and detailed her romantic life with a boyfriend, was open next to her bed. And she was shocked when a shirtless Kennedy, then 45, asked her to rub lotion on his back. “I thought, Isn’t Mary home?” she recalls. “Doesn’t she do this for you?”
She did it reluctantly and quickly. “It was totally inappropriate,” she says, adding that she stopped recording these experiences in her journal, fearing Kennedy would read them.
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.”
