Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced he is launching a podcast—conveniently a day after an excerpt from a new biography laid bare his alleged past infidelity.
The so-called Secretary Kennedy Podcast is coming soon, he said in a Wednesday announcement video. He supposedly plans to have “fearless conversations with critical thinkers, including independent doctors...”
“This podcast is about telling the truth even when it is uncomfortable,” he adds.
Kennedy, 72, did not live by that tagline during his marriage to Mary Richardson Kennedy, according to an excerpt from the Kennedy biography, RFK, Jr.: The Fall and Rise, that was released Tuesday.
Rather, the biographer Isabel Vincent claims that Kennedy “gaslit” his then-wife over his philandering.
“He definitely gaslit her and told her that she was crazy and that her accusations about other women were fantasies,” a source told Vincent, who is an investigative reporter at the New York Post. “She was innocent and naive, but she drank, which was classic in the sense of being in pain a lot of the time.”
Richardson was Kennedy’s second wife. She took her own life in May 2012, two years after Kennedy sprung on her that he wanted a divorce on Mother’s Day. Kennedy went on to marry the actress Cheryl Hines in 2014.
Secret diaries obtained by Vincent detailed Kennedy’s struggles with staying faithful to Richardson. He wrote that he had to contend with so-called “lust demons” and that no matter how much he had as a Kennedy scion, he was always hunting for “more.”
Kennedy, now the country’s top public health official, was an environmental lawyer during his marriage to Richardson. He once patted himself on the back for making it through a trip without giving in to temptation, the biography claims, citing his journal.
“I made it through a difficult week without acting out,” he wrote during a trip to the Hamptons in the summer of 1999, according to Vincent. “I am proud of myself because the Sirens were on every rock out there.”
Meanwhile, Vincent writes that Mary stayed at home, hosting endless events at the Kennedy house and raising their three children, all under the age of five at the time of that entry. Sources close to Richardson told Vincent that “much” of her depression was from Kennedy’s infidelity.
In recordings obtained by Mother Jones, Kennedy allegedly said in a 2011 argument with Richardson that it was her fault he cheated on her 37 times. Previous reports about Kennedy’s journals revealed that he would award each woman he bedded with a number between 1 and 10, with a “10” designation meaning they had intercourse.
He painted himself as the victim of seductresses, using the term “mugged” as if he were an unwilling participant, and “victory” when he did not succumb to their temptations. He was entirely an innocent party, in his own version.
Kennedy has not been able to shake his reputation as a womanizer, even now that he is in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Despite a decade of marriage to Hines, the then New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi, now 33, revealed in September 2024 that she had a months-long digital affair with him—complete with nude photos and sexting.
That bombshell revelation did not keep the thrice-married Trump, who himself has a history of alleged affairs, from appointing Kennedy as HHS secretary. Neither did his vaccine skepticism, his past heroin addiction, nor his claims to have once snorted cocaine off toilet seats.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
