By the summer of 2023, I had stopped supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign because I learned he supported U.S. military aid to Israel in its murderous occupation of Palestine, but I was a true believer earlier that year in April as I watched his kick-off speech. I was so proud and hopeful when he highlighted the legal work he did against my nemesis Monsanto (now Bayer) on behalf of Roundup-exposed cancer victims. I listened with rapt attention as he quoted the infamous Ralph Reed to describe the “safe” type of cabinet secretaries the typical President picks, as those who “get the joke” (meaning they know, even though they’re paid by the public, that their real job is to protect corporate interests). I loved it when delivered the zingers, “I get the joke, but I don’t think it’s funny” and “I’m not safe; my job is to keep you safe.”
I was pissed off when Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump, but I was cautiously optimistic when the reelected President appointed him Secretary of Health & Human Services and relieved when the Senate confirmed.
Still, I wouldn’t admit to supporting the Administration. When friends offered to suggest to “Bobby” that I be considered for a role at HHS, I demurred, telling them my solidarity with Palestine prevented it, but I figured there wasn’t any harm in campaigning for all the good things Kennedy could do at HHS. I stupidly believed these were possible, even as I saw the worrying signs that Kennedy was either Trump’s powerless captive or he was in on the joke, like that disturbing photo of him eating McDonald’s with Trump, Elon Musk, and House Speaker Mike Johnson that Donald Trump Jr., also in the photo, posted on Twitter with the caption, “Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW.”
As political director of the Organic Consumers Association, I set to work writing up action alerts telling our members to ask Secretary Kennedy to revoke the PREP Act declarations that shield pharmaceutical companies from liability for the deaths and injuries caused by pandemic countermeasures like the mRNA vaccines, and to make good on his promise to close the Food & Drug Administration’s use of the “generally recognized as safe” loophole and require pre-market safety testing of synthetic, genetically modified, and lab-grown food ingredients.
This week, I had to come to grips with the fact that not only is none of this going to happen, but much worse is in store for us over the next three years. It wasn’t just that Secretary Kennedy posted a Thanksgiving meme created from his humiliation ritual.
On Monday, Trump’s U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer did Bayer’s bidding. Bayer wants the Supreme Court to rule that lawsuits brought by Monsanto-poisoned cancer victims are preempted by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) that sets pesticide labeling requirements. Sauer agreed with Bayer, stating in the brief that the Environmental Protection Agency “has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings.” Among the outlets reporting the news, Common Dreams was one of the few to point out the significance of the Trump Administration attempting to undo one of Secretary Kennedy’s major achievements as a plaintiffs’ attorney:
Notably, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built his national profile campaigning against the dangers of pesticides and railing against regulatory capture by big business.
Kennedy served as an attorney for Dewayne Johnson, the first plaintiff to win damages against Monsanto in 2018, where a jury determined that Roundup had contributed to his cancer.
“If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luthor,” Kennedy said in a 2020 Facebook post. “I’ve seen this company as the enemy of every admirable American value.”
During Kennedy’s 2024 presidential run, he pledged to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals already banned in other countries.”
But after he was sworn in as President Donald Trump’s HHS Secretary, he began to sing a different tune. As Investigate Midwest noted, his “Make America Healthy Again” commission’s introductory report made no mention of glyphosate.
Meanwhile, he reassured the pesticide industry that it had nothing to worry about: “There’s a million farmers who rely on glyphosate. 100% of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model,” he said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
Why isn’t the MAHA movement freaking out about this? Or even acknowledging it’s happening? Is Secretary Kennedy going to just sit back and watch his greatest legal victory be overturned by the President he got elected?
Or, is it time to stop acting so shocked and just let it settle in that Kennedy and his MAHA act is just a big psyop?
I’m not the first to call it—Johnny Vedmore has been on this since 2023—but I’ve come to the same conclusion that Vedmore and others (Hash_Tigre on Twitter is the other main source for this article) have that RFK Jr. is controlled by the Deep State.
By Deep State, I mean the billionaires, corporations, and wealthy, well-connected families, who derive their power and wealth from their control of over us—our lives, our government, and our tax dollars. I don’t just mean the CIA, but that institution certainly sustains them—the Director of National Intelligence’s completely secret black budget now exceeds $100 billion a year. And, I don’t believe the Deep State is homogenous. It’s less a stable hierarchy than a competition for dominance. Many, if not most, of the people who play in it at the highest levels end up ruined, disgraced, killed, or in jail, and they all seem to be compromised and fettered. That explains how someone like RFK Jr., who built his identity as the avenging nephew and son of two men murdered by the Deep State, could simultaneously be part of it.
There were obvious red flags: Kennedy’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell; his loyalty to and cover-ups for accused rapists and his own sex addiction, infidelities, and allegations of misconduct; the odd things he did following his second wife’s suspicious suicide (and the things he did prior that could have driven her to kill herself); his support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine; the way he stayed quiet while Rabbi Shmuley Boteach used an appearance with him to reiterate a story he has always said is false, that his father Robert F. Kennedy was murdered by a lone gunman, Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, because of his support of Israel; his choice to replace his pro-Palestinian campaign manager, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, with his daughter-in-law, “former” CIA agent Amaryllis Fox; and how he chose the CIA’s the lab leak cover-story over plandemic reality in his Wuhan Cover-Up… just to name a few.
The only only question that remains is the extent to which Kennedy is a Deep State actor by free will or under threat.
Nothing answers that question better than his relationship with Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and the lies he’s told about it—especially to Whitney Webb, author of the definitive history of the pair and their genre, One Nation Under Blackmail (2022). It’s hard to overestimate the influence Webb had in the COVID-truth scene as RFK Jr. rose to prominence within it. In January 2020, she was the first to suggest that COVID-19 might not be a naturally occurring virus (“Bats, Gene Editing And Bioweapons: Recent DARPA Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak”), and in April 2020, she published her “Engineering Contagion” series positioning Trump’s pandemic countermeasures manager, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec within the Deep State cabal that planned and profited from the 9/11-linked 2001 false-flag anthrax attacks—and appeared to be behind plandemic, too.
RFK Jr’s reputation was Whitney Webb’s to tarnish or varnish. She could have marshaled the evidence that RFK Jr and his second wife Mary Richardson were besties with Epstein and Maxwell, and explained that this was no surprise given RFK Jr was an out-of-control sex addict whose dozens of infidelities drove Mary to suicide (if her death actually was a suicide) and that RFK Jr consistently stood by his many friends and family members who were accused rapists, murderers, and pedophiles. RFK Jr clearly got a pass because Webb believed he agreed with her views on the plandemic. Now that RFK Jr is proving useless or worse as a Trump cabinet secretary is there any reason to keep cutting him slack?
The story RFK Jr gave Webb was that he and the rest of the Kennedy clan met Ghislaine Maxwell through his second wife Mary Richardson (best friends with his sister Kerry Kennedy going back to high school).
It’s more likely that Mary Richardson was introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell by Kerry Kennedy.
As the New York Times reported in “Washington Talk; Who’s Who at Parties? (Nobody Is Just Nobody),” in 1989, Robert Maxwell hired Robert Keith Gray’s CIA-connected Hill & Knowlton PR firm to get an assortment of A-list Washingtonians to turn up at a party on his 190-foot yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. Among the people available to come at a moment’s notice to Hill & Knowlton’s beck and call—invitations were sent by messenger less than 24 hours before the event—were Kerry and Michael Kennedy.
(In 1997, it would come out that Michael Kennedy was having an affair with his children’s underage babysitter, beginning when she was just 14 years old, but he said he didn’t have sex with her until she was 16, the legal age of consent in Massachusetts at the time. Later that same year he died after hitting a tree while playing football on skis.)
In the story RFK Jr told to Whitney Webb about how Mary Richardson introduced the Kennedys to Ghislaine Maxwell, he said that Maxwell and Richardson met one another in the 1980s when they dated two men who were step-brothers. Richardson was with Carlos Mavroleon and Maxwell was with Gianfranco Cicogna. (Gianfranco’s mother Gioconda de Gallardo y Castro was one of Carlos’s father Manuel Basil “Bluey” Mavroleon’s four wives.) Cicogna was the great-grandson of Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata I, Mussolini’s Finance Minister during the 1920s. The Kennedys had been friends with Volpi family for generations.
In 1967, RFK Jr’s grandparents, Joe and Rose Kennedy, attended a masked ball hosted by Cicogna’s grandfather Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata II and Cicogna’s father Giuseppe Ascanio Cicogna Mozzoni. Also at the party were Clare Booth Luce and Aristotle Onassis. Luce was the mistress and partner-in-crime of Allen Dulles, the disgraced former CIA director who conspired to murder their son, President John F Kennedy, and cover-up his assassination. Onassis was the Greek shipping magnate their bereaved daughter-in-law, Jaqueline Kennedy, would marry the next year. Onassis was there with his daughter Christina who in 1981 would date Nicky Mavroleon at the same time Richardson was dating his brother.
Carlos Mavroleon’s bio screams “intelligence operative.” The Harvard-educated heir to Bluey’s $100 million shipping fortune would fight the Russians with the CIA-armed Mujahideen in Afghanistan and date Fawn Hall, known for her role in the CIA’s Iran-Contra gun-and-drug-running operation. In 1998, at age 40, he died in Pakistan on the Afghan border. The U.S. was in the midst of its “Infinite Reach” missile strikes against what it said were terrorist training camps responsible for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Mavroleon’s assignment with CBS’s 60 Minutes was to get an interview with the man the U.S. said ran those camps, Osama bin Laden. The official cause of death was heroine overdose, but a fellow journalist wrote a piece in the Observer suggesting that he may have been targeted by Pakistani intelligence for being British spy. Another theory for why the Pakistanis would want Mavroleon dead was that had inadvertently discovered that the camps weren’t run by bin Laden but by the Pakistani military. The Observer article says that Mavroleon was so close to the Kennedys that, “When it became clear that something awful had happened to Carlos, Ethel Kennedy, wife of Bobby senior, rang the White House to find out exactly what was wrong.”
Ghislaine Maxwell’s boyfriend Gianfranco Cicogna also had the action-packed career of an international man of mystery. In 2004, he was caught by South Africa conspiring to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea along with Mark Thatcher, son of the former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In 2012, at age 49, Cicogna died in a plane crash during an airshow.
It was clearly Mary Richardson would have needed an introduction. She was the only one in this unique circle of friends who didn’t come from a wealthy or high-born family. Her father John F. Richardson, secretary of the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology, died of cancer in 1971 when Mary was 12. Her mother Anne M. “Nancy” Richardson (Higgins) was a public school teacher. Described by all who knew her as exceedingly intelligent, talented, and capable, we can assume Mary was a scholarship student at the Putney School, Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Mary Richardson probably didn’t meet Ghislaine Maxwell until 1990 at Kerry Kennedy’s wedding to Andrew Cuomo where Richardson was the maid of honor.
In an interview with the Department of Justice, Maxwell said that it was Kerry Kennedy, not Andrew Cuomo, who invited her to their wedding, and Maxwell denied that Epstein and Cuomo had a relationship.
In “Andrew Cuomo Has A Jeffrey Epstein Problem,” Jacobin lists several people close to both men, including Dan Klores, a long-time friend who was at Cuomo’s bachelor party in 1990. Cuomo was the first and, for a time, only client of Klores’s newly formed PR firm, when he first ran for governor in 2002. Klores was also Cuomo’s chief advisor in that unsuccessful bid. Four years later, in 2006, Klores’s was on Jeffrey Epstein’s PR team, protecting Epstein’s image in the face of accusations he abused underage girls.
Kennedy and Cuomo separated in 2003, and divorced in 2005, but in 2012, when Kerry was charged with impaired driving, her lawyer was Gerald Lefcourt who had been part of Epstein’s legal team in Florida.
No matter whose idea it was to invite Maxwell to the Kennedy-Cuomo wedding (maybe Hill & Knowlton?), it is clear that, Kennedy and Cuomo shared a circle of friends that included Epstein and Maxwell—and Mary and Bobby.
Ghislaine Maxwell is said to have met Jeffrey Epstein in 1991. A 1992 report from the Mail on Sunday, “The Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Secret Love - Revealed: The Unlikely Romance Between a Business Spy and the Crooked Financier’s Favorite Daughter” sounds like it was trying to make Jeffrey Epstein sounds like Carlos Mavroleon or Gianfranco Cicogna. Epstein is described as “a shadowy, almost maverick New York ‘property developer’” before it’s said, “One outrageous story links him to the CIA and Mossad. Another that Epstein was a concert pianist. Yet another that he was a maths teacher at an exclusive girls school. The most intriguing rumor is that he was a corporate spy hired by big businesses to uncover money that had been embezzled.” Epstein is said to have told people he “had once been a stockbroker and investment banker for the Bear Stearns securities group. But the National Association of Securities Dealers has no record of him with that company.” The article goes on to say that, “He appears to have an inexhaustible supply of money and yet no one seems able to answer the question of precisely what the source is. His Madison Avenue office is decorated with fabulous works of art, and he has been known to drive a Silver Spirit Rolls-Royce. … According to a close friend, Epstein is now the right-hand man of Leslie Wexner, the founder of the Limited Corporation, a giant retailing chain.”
It is possible that Kerry Kennedy and Mary Richardson knew Epstein first, through the New York Academy of Art where Epstein was a board member from from 1987 to 1994. NYAA was funded and co-founded by Andy Warhol and Stuart Pivar who was very close friends with Jeffrey Epstein going back to the early 1970s. Pivar told Mother Jones that it was Epstein who brought Maxwell to New York after her father died. This tracks with Whitney Webb’s theory that Robert Maxwell knew Epstein through Leslie Wexner’s Mega Group:
[W]hen he [Epstein] brought Ghislaine [Maxwell] to this country, he put me in charge of her because she was a total wreck. It was my job to try to amuse her. …
[W]hen she arrived, after her father jumped off the boat or whatever happened, she was a total wreck. And my job was to amuse her, take her to dinner and lunch and what have you until she finally came around, and then was okay.
When I watched this happen, I had no idea what the hell it was all about.
* * *
Jeffrey was afflicted with a disease. And if it was tuberculosis, you wouldn’t call it a perversion because someone coughs too much. Instead, he was uncontrollable, and he had the dough to yield to it and then, by chance, had a partner in it, Ghislaine, who was a basket case.
* * *
She arrived a dysfunctional wreck from what happened to her on account of her father. And the last thing that should’ve happened to someone like that is to fall in to the care of the likes of Jeffrey. He molded her into being complicit with his aberrations.
Richardson worked for Andy Warhol in 1980 and she and Kerry were friends with him.
In 1980, Richardson collected donations of artwork from Warhol and other prominent artists in his network to raise money for Ted Kennedy’s run for the White House.
In 1982, Andy Warhol wrote in his diary, “I ran into Mary Richardson and she said she was getting married to John Samuels’s roommate from Harvard. Carlos Mavroleon. Well that’s what she says but I remember he had a lisp. It’d be funny if he’s a straight person with a lisp, but I don’t know.”
In Mary Richardson’s Wikipedia entry, there’s a long gap in her resumé between 1981, when she was earning $500 per hour as a model for fashion designer Bill Blass and when she went to work for Parrish Hadley Design in 1993. Wikipedia says that “in the 1980s, [she] was active in the bohemian culture.”
It seems she was also doing odd jobs for her friends the Kennedys in exchange for the used of Kerry’s cash card and room and board. After Mary Richardson allegedly died by suicide in 2012, Kerry wrote an “Ode to My Best Friend -- Mary Richardson Kennedy” in the Huffington Post that fills in some of the gaps Wikipedia leaves:
I met Mary on her first day at Putney, we were 15. The next weekend we hitch hiked to Boston to see my siblings Michael, Bobby, David, Courtney and Kathleen, and for the rest of her life, she spent nearly every weekend and vacation with our family. We were roommates from the time we were 15 [1975] until 30 [1990], when I got married and four years later [1994], she married my brother. When we moved back to New York, I moved a mile down the street in Mount Kisco, to be close to them.
We were inseparable -- we shared friendships, a closet, a cash card. People couldn’t tell our voices apart.
* * *
Once we ran into her future brother-in-law, Andy Karsch [friends with RFK Jr since 1972, he married Mary’s sister Nan Richardson], at Mortimer’s and he said “I never see you two apart -- you are just schizophrenic.” And we replied, in protest, at the exact same moment, “No, we’re not!”
* * *
When my brother Joe started Citizens Energy, Mary designed, wrote, and produced his first annual report, and designed the logo, which he still uses today. She was 17 at the time.
* * *
In 1986, she went to work on Joe’s congressional campaign and brought some of her trademark mischievousness to the old Boston tradition of handing out coffee and doughnuts on Election Day. At that time, there was another Mary Richardson, the beloved local newscaster. Mary called all the restaurants in the district saying, “Hi, I’m Mary Richardson, and I’m helping Joe Kennedy’s campaign. Would you like to donate something for Election Day?” So, when the other campaigns handed out lukewarm coffee and stale donuts, Citizens for Joe brought out a spread of sushi, pad thai, and lobster thermidor from Loch Ober’s.
Mary was a master at securing donations for good causes and considered the challenge a contact sport. In the mid-1980s, the military had cut off supplies to the poorest regions of El Salvador, and she volunteered to help the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights put together a truck load of food, clothes and medical supplies for the Mothers of the Disappeared. I suggested she “start with that store that starts with ‘The’ and sells clothes,” as the CEO had helped my mother years earlier. Mary called the CEO, and when his assistant said he was off on an island vacation and unavailable, Mary explained that he was a dear friend and always incredibly generous and we needed the supplies right away. An hour later, Mary proudly reported she had secured 6 truck loads from The Limited, to which I responded, “Oh, we know the guy from The Gap!”
Thanks to Mary, the CoMadres ended up with 10 containers filled with tens of millions in food, clothes and medical supplies.
* * *
In 1980, Mary spent the semester working for Andy Warhol. Teddy (Senator Edward Kennedy) was running for president, and someone came up with the idea of Artists for Kennedy. Mary immediately asked Warhol for a lithograph and his rolodex. She proceeded to secure donations from Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Schnabel and everyone else who walked through the doors of the Factory. At 20 years old, she raised millions.
Mary was a designer for Parish Hadley, a rafting guide on the Kennebec and the Dead, she could build a campfire and on it cook a gourmet meal for 100, throw on a pot, weave a blanket, knit a hat, plumb a john, sponge paint a ceiling, and have a successful run as part of a girl group of go-go dancers in the cages at Studio 54.
Sure, it would be easy to confuse Leslie Wexner of the Limited with Millard Drexler of the Gap, but I’m not sure I’m buying Kerry’s story, given that Ethel Kennedy was in Epstein’s black book, and the relationship Robert and Mary Richardson Kennedy are known to have later had with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Photos from 1994 show them at New York Academy of Art fundraiser with Jeffrey Epstein. The next year, Epstein was accused by 25-year-old NYAA student Maria Farmer of sexually assaulting her and her 15-year-old sister—with Ghislaine’s help. Stuart Pivar told Mother Jones that he ended his friendship with Epstein when Farmer told him this.
RFK Jr remained stayed friends with them after these allegations and even after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor and was sentenced to 18 months in jail (2008). RFK Jr was photographed at Maxwell’s house in 2014. Mary had died two years earlier in 2012.
In, “RFK Jr Caught in Lie About Jeffrey Epstein Flight,” published by Newsweek, a spokesperson for RFK Jr created yet another story about Maxwell being Richardson’s friend, this time that they met serving on a food allergy charity together:
“Mr. Kennedy flew two times on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane.
“The first time was in 1993 from NYC to Palm Beach to visit RFK, Jr.’s mom for Easter. His wife Mary and two children accompanied him on the flight. Mary knew Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell because they served on a food allergy charity together. Maxwell learned that they were going to Palm Beach for Easter and offered their family a ride.
“The second time in the mid-90s, Mr. Epstein flew Mr. Kennedy, his wife Mary, and five children to South Dakota for a fossil-hunting trip.”
The idea that Mary met Ghislaine through a food allergy charity is preposterous, but the big lie here isn’t in the details of when and with whom and how many times RFK Jr was on Epstein’s plane. RFK Jr’s big lie is that, while Mary had “some kind of relationship” with Ghislaine, he was just along for the ride and had nothing to do with Epstein.
We know this isn’t true from destitute Serbian princess Christina Oxenberg’s book Trash about her encounters with Jeffrey Epstein, who she met at a dinner party in 1985, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who she met at the Kennedy-Cuomo wedding in 1990. Like Richardson, Oxenberg seems to be a Kennedy “friend”—she says her mother told her President John F. Kennedy was her real father—who was treated more like an employee. She reveals that Kennedy was so close to Jeffrey Epstein that he had free use of his office space:
In 1993, I was hired for a public-relations position by my friend and possible cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr. … Bobby’s instructions were: “You have three months to complete the assignment. There is no budget, so you’ll have to get everything for free. Just ask for things and use my name. And to get the ball rolling, I’ve already borrowed an office for you to work from.” That office space would be in Jeffrey Epstein’s suite of offices on Madison Avenue.
* * *
On the first day of the job, Ghislaine and Epstein tripped over themselves to assure each other they already knew me. I was a rung on the ladder they were clambering up. I had many interactions with them over the three months required to produce the event. They both, but mostly Ghislaine, lolled and chatted with me … They mostly talked about their jet, or name-dropped the people they were “meeting” with. Why they were meeting anyone was never explained. … The job itself was great fun. Bobby Kennedy had privately won a concession from then New York City Mayor David Dinkins. Bobby wanted the Mayor to say this publicly in front of the press corps. Thus, an event needed to be produced and the Mayor invited and filmed for the TV networks.
Kennedy claims he didn’t know about Epstein’s character or misconduct at the time—as if that would have mattered. In 1991, RFK Jr. publicly defended his cousin William Kennedy Smith, who was tried and acquitted that year, accused of raping a woman at the family’s compound in Palm Beach. (Just a coincidence that that is where Jeffrey Epstein committed so many of his crimes?) RFK Jr. said his cousin’s accuser had some “sad and serious emotional problems.” In 1997, RFK Jr. publicly defended his babysitter-loving pedophile brother Michael L. Kennedy. In 2016, he wrote a book defending cousin Michael Skakel, accused of the 1975 rape and murder of Martha Moxley. RFK Jr variously blamed the Skakel family’s tutor Kenneth Littleton, their handyman and chauffeur Larry Zicarelli, and their gardener Frank Wittine. Later, he claimed two black kids from the Bronx, Adolph “Al” Hasbrouck and Burton Tinsley came all the way to Greenwich, Connecticut to do it. RFJ Jr’s work helped Skakel get out of jail, but none of the other men was ever charged with the crime.
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