Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an interview with Sirius XM released Wednesday pushed back on a scathing Vanity Fair report while also expressing concerns about President Joe Biden's age following his uneven debate performance.
Biden has "only had 40 interviews in the last six months. And, you know, I do about 40 interviews a week, and the interviews that he has are highly curated with very, very friendly interviewers like George Stephanopoulos, who can be guaranteed not to ask him any difficult questions or anything that's unpredictable," Kennedy told SiriusXM's "The Briefing with Steve Scully," which aired Wednesday afternoon.
"And so we're not, you know, I think Americans need to understand, need to see him in a combat role and understand that he is the guy who at three o'clock in the morning can be woken up, and while he's being pushed through the White House, and he has six minutes after being woken up to make a decision that's going to affect all of humanity and affect all of our children, a momentous decision. And we need to know that he's going to be in shape, who with the mental acuity to make the right decision for all of us. And I think if he can't show that, then, you know, there's a strong argument that he should not be in that position."
Kennedy has been called a potential election "spoiler" by standing to take votes away from both major-party candidates.
The Vanity Fair article said that in 1998, Kennedy and his then-wife Mary Richardson hired a 23-year-old woman, Eliza Cooney, as their part-time babysitter, who told the magazine that Kennedy groped her in the family kitchen.
Cooney told Reuters on Tuesday that the details in the Vanity Fair article on the assault were accurate.
When asked about the allegation, Kennedy told a podcast on Tuesday, "I am not a church boy."
"I had a very, very rambunctious youth," he told podcaster Saagar Enjeti. "I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world."
On allegations he ate a dog, Kennedy told SiriusXM, "Oh, I saw that the big item in that piece is that I ate a dog in Korea and they have a picture of me eating something that they say was a dog.
"And they say trust the experts that we have now, veterinary experts, who've confirmed that this is a canine. And they say that they use metadata to pinpoint the place where I was eating to Korea. So I've never been in Korea. I've never eaten a dog. And that picture is of me eating a goat in Patagonia. I do a whitewater trip down there, or I have done every year, and that's what we eat. The gauchos come over and cook goats for us, and that's what we eat. So they were so desperate to — the entire article is just a garbage pail of rumors and old stories and invented facts and defamations and libels that, you know, and that's really emblematic of everything they did in that article."