Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in Washington earlier this month.J. Scott Applewhite/AP
In the early 2010s, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went through a contentious divorce with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. It was ugly. Richardson had found a diary RFK Jr. kept that chronicled multiple extramarital affairs he had engaged in—possibly numbering in the dozens—and she was enraged and tormented by his infidelity. She was drinking and racked up two DUIs. The two fought for years over the custody of their four children. The battle ended on May 16, 2012, with her suicide by hanging at their home in Bedford, New York.
During that stretch, RFK Jr., who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, secretly recorded telephone and in-person conversations he had with Richardson, and in at least one instance he may have violated state law in doing so.
Mother Jones has obtained a cache of these audio recordings that include more than 60 conversations that occurred in 2011 and early 2012. In many of the recordings, Richardson was distraught over the end of her marriage to Kennedy. Sometimes she bitterly lashed out at him, cursing and yelling; occasionally she asked for reconciliation. Knowing he was recording, Kennedy was decidedly more circumspect than was she. He often pressed her to complete the divorce and blamed her behavior for their breakup and his affairs. In none of the recordings did Kennedy inform Richardson that she was being recorded or ask for her consent to be recorded.
“I have witnessed Bobby’s obsessive-compulsive need to not only beat but also annihilate someone he perceives as an adversary.”
In one angry conversation on June 4, 2011, Kennedy, who had married Richardson in 1994 after his first divorce, said to her, “I want to be in a monogamous relationship. I don’t want to be in a polygamous relationship. I think that’s wrong.” Richardson then asked, “But then why have you done it for 10 years?” Kennedy replied, “I did it because I was being abused at home.” (Mother Jones is not publishing the recordings because they contain allegations we have not confirmed and information about third parties that raises privacy concerns.)
Kennedy did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the recordings.
Most of the recordings were apparently made while both Kennedy and Richardson were in New York state, which is a one-party consent state when it comes to recording a conversation. That means under New York state law only one person in the conversation needs to be aware of the recording for it to be a legal act.
But in one instance, Kennedy recorded a phone conversation with Richardson when he was apparently in California, which is a two-party consent state. Under California law, a person needs the agreement of all parties to a conversation to record a private call. Violating this law is punishable by a fine up to $2,500 and a prison sentence of up to one year.
This call occurred on June 14, 2011. That week, Kennedy was in Los Angeles for the premiere of The Last Mountain, a documentary on mountaintop removal mining based partly on a 2005 book by Kennedy. During that eight-minute-long call, the two argued, as Kennedy pleaded with her to sign a custody agreement, and Richardson aired her grievances about him and asked him to avoid having their 16-year-old son, Conor, publicly photographed with actor Cheryl Hines, Kennedy’s girlfriend whom he later married. On the audio file of this call, Kennedy did not inform Richardson the conversation was being recorded.
The violation of two-party consent in California is a criminal misdemeanor, but it can also be cause for a civil lawsuit. In general, the statute of limitations in California for a criminal misdemeanor is one year. In cases in which one of the participants in a recorded conversation is in a one-party consent state and another in California, according to Conn Law, a California-based law firm specializing in privacy rights, “California courts typically favor the two-party consent law, meaning that when one party is in California, the stricter rule applies.”
Kennedy’s recordings of his conversations with Richardson were covered by a discovery request in the divorce case, according to a person familiar with the legal proceedings, but none of this material was turned over to Richardson’s attorneys.
At one point during the divorce, Richardson came to suspect that Kennedy was making secret recordings.
As part of the legal proceedings, Kennedy filed a sealed, 60-page affidavit loaded with allegations of misconduct by Richardson. It accused Richardson of violent outbursts, excessive drinking, physically abusing him, and threatening suicide in front of their children. In March 2012, months after this affidavit was filed, Richardson, with the assistance of her sisters Martha and Nan Richardson, compiled a point-by-point draft rebuttal to Kennedy’s affidavit.
This document was obtained by Mother Jones, and its authenticity was confirmed by a Richardson family member. In this draft, Richardson stated that Kennedy “has been stealthily tape recording phone conversations in my home.” She also claimed Kennedy “has left his affidavits, transcripts of surreptitiously recorded phone conversations and other documents strewn about for anyone to see.”
The draft accused Kennedy of waging a “scorched earth” campaign against Richardson, and it presented a host of allegations against Kennedy, including the claims that he was a lousy parent, that he misled her about the extent of his infidelity, that he was physically abusive with her, and that he was abusing prescription medicine. She referred to him as a “sexual deviant” and a sex addict, and the document noted she possessed text messages and photographs from Kennedy’s phone related to his affairs.
The draft document described many episodes in their troubled marriage. Richardson acknowledged some of her own faults and recalled a time when she lost her temper and hit Kennedy. But she denied many of the allegations in Kennedy’s affidavit and said she had never talked about killing herself in front of the children.
She also included many negative assessments of her estranged husband. “I have witnessed Bobby’s obsessive-compulsive need to not only beat but also annihilate someone he perceives as an adversary,” she said. She also challenged his veracity: “He is also well known for his passionate, entertaining speech making, hyperbole and total exaggeration.” She added, “He re-jiggers the facts, or makes them up, and rushes to tell as many people as he can so that is the version of reality that gets distributed in people’s minds—classic gaslighting.” She asserted that Kennedy had sold “the media the lie of his perfect family.”
Kennedy did not respond to questions about this document.
There was much anger and sadness—as well as sordid accusations—in Richardson’s draft reply to Kennedy’s affidavit. “I have carried the burden of Bobby and his family’s most intimate secrets since I was fifteen,” she wrote.
Richardson never filed in court a version of this document. Two months later, she was dead.