RFK Jr.: Choice to Honor Harry and Meghan at Kennedy Gala is ‘Bewildering’

Robert F. Kennedy’s third child—the one who grew up to be a virulent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist—thinks it’s mystifying that his family’s human rights foundation would choose to honor the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at a forthcoming gala. “It’s a bewildering choice,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Daily Mail on Monday. However, Kennedy added, the pick is “still an encouraging step up from 2020,” referring to the choice to honor Dr. Anthony Fauci that year. In October, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, which is run by Kerry Kennedy, the late senator’s seventh child, announced that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would receive an award at the 2022 Ripple of Hope Gala. The decision was immediately slammed by at least one prominent Kennedy family scholar, David Nasaw, who called it “somewhere between sublimely ridiculous and blatantly ludicrous.” Nasaw, known for penning a biography on Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, asked “what in God’s name” the Sussexes had done “to merit” the award, especially when compared to past recipients, who include former President Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, and actor Robert De Niro. This December’s gala will be hosted in New York City by Alec Baldwin.