Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has had a busy year.
In January, he took heat for asking if baseball star Hank Aaron’s sudden death could be related to the COVID-19 vaccine since Aaron was vaccinated several weeks before he died. In February, Kennedy was thrown off Instagram for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” as Instagram parent Facebook explained it. And in early March, Kennedy was called a racist for producing a film that exploits the history of black people’s medical fears to urge avoiding all coronavirus vaccines.
While Kennedy may be best known as America’s most prominent anti-vaxxer, it is his focus on an equally hopeless but repeatedly resurrected conspiracy tale that the media not only fail to fact-check but also habitually reinforce.
Over the next few months, Kennedy will be back in the news addressing the legacy of the 1968 murder of his father, the attorney general, Fidel Castro hunter, senator, and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. The 16th parole hearing of convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, serving life in prison, is set for Aug. 27 in California. Kennedy says his father’s murderer is innocent.
The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Netflix, and other outlets that should know better have led a media resurgence in recent years boosting pro-conspiracy theory claims that somebody other than the Palestinian American Sirhan murdered RFK in a Los Angeles hotel ballroom kitchen. Surrounded by dozens of people, Sirhan fired every single round from his .22 pistol, including several while being tackled, wounding five others, and striking RFK three times.
The case for the conspiracy theory that Kennedy touts goes like this: Another shooter, behind the senator, fired the fatal shots, even as Sirhan fired away madly in front of the target, to distract from the real killer. Kennedy points to an autopsy report that said the shots came from behind and closer to RFK’s head than the 3 feet that most witnesses said is the distance between Sirhan and RFK.
Yet, as hotel employee Vincent DiPierro told the Washington Post’s Ronald Kessler in 1974, “It would be impossible for there to be a second gun. I saw the first shot. Kennedy fell at my feet. His blood splattered on me. I had a clear view of Kennedy and Sirhan.”
Why the media seem to refuse to see the truth about this aging, thoroughly investigated case is not complicated. Silly tales of dark conspiracies draw eyeballs and viewers. A new generation, the first to have its views amplified globally in seconds via social media, is more conspiracy theory-friendly and spends hours daily scrounging the web for clickable shock to share. Kennedy coming out in support of his father’s killer in 2017, after visiting Sirhan in prison in San Diego, served as fuel to several media projects supporting Sirhan that soon followed.
In 2018, the Washington Post seriously considered whether Sirhan was hypnotized to shoot RFK. In recent years, CNN and other TV outlets focused on an audio recording that purported to be of the shooting itself and to have revealed too many shots were fired than could fit into Sirhan’s gun. But this claim was debunked as better acoustic analysis was brought to bear.
The popular Netflix documentary Bobby Kennedy for President from several years ago devoted an entire episode to the shooting, farcically considering the views of Paul Schrade, an RFK-supporting union official who was wounded by a Sirhan shot. Schrade, whom Kennedy credits with talking him into believing Sirhan’s innocence, showed up at Sirhan’s last parole hearing in 2016, haranguing the parole board for an hour about how the man before them did indeed shoot Schrade but is somehow absolutely innocent of shooting RFK.
As The Forgotten Terrorist has shown, Sirhan has certainly demonstrated multiple times over the years in interviews, writings, and outbursts that he is lying about not remembering the shooting.
Back to Kennedy’s conspiracy theory about retired MLB star Aaron. The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office attributed Aaron’s death to “natural causes.” The media then launched broadsides against Kennedy for questioning whether Aaron’s death might have been related to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine he received 17 days earlier.
But Kennedy later reported that the Georgia medical examiner’s office directly denied to him that anyone there even saw Aaron’s body and said that it did no postmortem investigation on the case. The kerfuffle started the ball rolling to getting Kennedy banned from Instagram. It seems reasonable to ask why a fuller explanation was not forthcoming earlier from authorities.
Some conspiracy theories, it seems, are allowed. The more inconvenient ones, however, are not.
Craig Colgan is a Washington-based writer. Mel Ayton is the author of The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, published by Potomac Books.
