Analysis | RFK Jr.’s distorted account of evidence he provided in a cousin’s case (2024)

DNC chair Harrison, in a nearly two-minute video comparing Kennedy’s record on race to Donald Trump’s in an appeal to voters, first cited Trump’s 1989 full-page newspaper ad calling for a return of the death penalty following a rape in New York’s Central Park. Five Black and Latino teenagers were convicted, spent years in prison and were later cleared in the case. “Donald Trump is not the only person running for president who has falsely accused young men of color of committing a crime,” Harrison says in the video. Harrison then accuses Kennedy of spreading “false and racist claims” in his effort to clear his cousin Michael Skakel of murder charges, including writing a book about the case.

Kennedy responded that the DNC had offered a “dishonest distortion of this story.” Harrison offers opinion in his commentary — “racism here couldn’t be more bleak” — but his factual description of the Skakel case holds up. It’s Kennedy who distorts the story in his response, in both small and significant ways.

Let’s unpack what happened. The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The legal travails of Skakel, 63, went on for decades.

Martha Moxley, a 15-year-old neighbor of the Skakel family in the Belle Haven community of Greenwich, Conn., was found murdered under a pine tree at her home on Oct. 30, 1975. She had been beaten in the head with a golf club belonging to the Skakel family and stabbed in the neck with a broken golf club handle. Skakel was also 15 at the time, and no one was initially charged. For years, speculation swirled in the media about who was responsible for the murder, with books published suggesting it was either Michael Skakel or his brother Tommy. The Skakels’ father — whose sister was Kennedy’s mother — in 1993 commissioned a private investigation in an effort to clear his sons, according to Kennedy, but a grand jury began investigating again in 1998 after a leak of the findings indicated that Michael and Tommy told details to private detectives about their activities that night that they had not disclosed to the police.

In 2002, Skakel was convicted of Moxley’s murder, largely on circ*mstantial evidence, and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He had been incarcerated for more than 11 years when, in 2013, a judge granted him a new trial, saying his lawyer failed to represent him properly. In a separate ruling a month later, he was released from prison under strict conditions. The Connecticut Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote in 2016, reinstated the conviction, saying the defense was adequate. But by 2018, the makeup of the court had changed, and Skakel was again granted a new trial in another 4-3 vote. On the 45th anniversary of the murder, a state prosecutor in 2020 announced the state would not retry Skakel, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to prove guilt as 17 of 50 potential witnesses were dead.

In 2016, Kennedy published “Framed,” a book arguing that Skakel had not murdered Moxley. Instead, Kennedy said he was “convinced” the murderers were Adolph Hasbrouck, 15 at the time of the killing, and Burton “Burr” Tinsley, also 15. “Adolph, a volatile teen from the South Bronx, was African American, six foot three inches tall, and 200 pounds,” Kennedy wrote. Tinsley, who lived in Lower Manhattan, had “Asian/American Indian/Caucasian ancestry” and “was of similar height and build.”

Kennedy’s key source for this claim was Gitano “Tony” Bryant, whom Kennedy interviewed. Bryant said he was in Belle Haven the night of the killing with Hasbrouck and Tinsley, two acquaintances at the time. In Bryant’s account, Kennedy wrote, Hasbrouck became infatuated with Moxley after meeting her at a Greenwich street festival in September 1975.

Moxley’s diary has many references, some not flattering, to Michael Skakel and his brother Tommy. On Oct. 4, she wrote, “At the dance he [Tommy] kept putting his arms around me … making moves.” And she complained about Michael’s drinking about a month before her death.

Moxley’s diary also lists two interactions with Bryant in January of 1975 but does not mention Hasbrouck by name.

Bryant claimed that on the day of the murder, he took the train from New York up to Greenwich with Hasbrouck and Tinsley, who allegedly spoke about “going cave man” on someone that night. But Bryant said he went home earlier because he sensed the other two were headed for trouble. As part of his research, Kennedy also interviewed Hasbrouck — who told him he was not in Belle Haven on the night of the murder — and Tinsley. Kennedy concluded in his book that there were inconsistencies in their stories.

Kennedy testified in the 2007 retrial proceeding and, according to a transcript obtained by The Fact Checker, he acknowledged that multiple people he spoke to had no recollection of Hasbrouck and Tinsley being in the neighborhood on the night of Moxley’s murder. Kennedy acknowledged to the prosecutor that he had told a witness that Hasbrouck’s life “seems too normal and mainstream” for Bryant’s story to add up and that “this story is not right.” He also acknowledged that, until informed by the prosecutor, he had been unaware that Bryant was convicted in 1993 of conspiracy to commit robbery and had been accused of tax fraud. (In 2017, Bryant pleaded guilty to two cases of tax fraud, resulting in a seven-year prison term and an order to pay almost $9.4 million in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.)

“It was a lily White community in a lily White county,” Lawrence Schoenbach, an attorney who represented Hasbrouck when the accusations by Bryant and Kennedy first emerged, said in an interview, speaking on Hasbrouck’s behalf. He said there was even extra security in Belle Haven because it was the night before Halloween — Mischief Night — when kids toilet-paper trees, smash pumpkins and engage in other high jinks. “Not a soul there saw anyone Black that night. He would have stood out like a sore thumb.”

With that background, let’s look at Kennedy’s specific points, in the order in which he made them.

“ … two men, one black and one white …”

This is misleading, possibly in an attempt to show his accusation was not intended to single out people of color or show a preoccupation with tropes connecting race and crime. Kennedy previously has described Tinsley as Asian or mixed race, not White. In his book, he said the FBI crime lab found two hairs on a forensic sheet used to cover Moxley’s body — one “possessing Negroid characteristics” and the other possibly having “an Asian DNA profile.”

In interviews, Kennedy emphasized the alleged Asian profile as well. “The other [hair] was part Caucasian and part either Asian or American Indian,” he told Charlie Rose in 2016.

In 2007, the prosecutor in the case filed a brief that said Tinsley “was described by some as African American, although Bryant claimed he was of mixed Caucasian, Indian and Asian heritage.” Tinsley has said little publicly about the case and could not be located for comment.

“Tony Bryant — first cousin of basketball great Kobe Bryant.”

Kennedy mentions this apparently to enhance Bryant’s credibility, but the claim of a family connection has not been confirmed, though it has often been reported as fact.

“Tony Bryant testified under oath”

This is false. Bryant in 2003 spoke to a private investigator hired by Michael Skakel in a videotaped interview but refused to testify under oath in 2006. The state would not grant him immunity because Bryant was not a credible witness, prosecutor Susann Gill told the Connecticut Supreme Court in 2009. None of the 15 people he claimed to have seen the night of the murder — including Skakel’s siblings — corroborated his presence, she said.

“The state is not in the habit of granting immunity to people whose credibility we think is worthless,” Gill said.

“It’s completely false,” Schoenbach said of Bryant’s account. “He had the opportunity to testify under oath. He refused.”

In a 2020 interview, Kennedy acknowledged that Bryant did not testify under oath. “Well, of course, he is not going to do that because he admits that he brought the murderers to Greenwich. … because he could be charged with that crime,” Kennedy said in an episode of “48 hours” on CBS that examined the case and aired in 2021.

Hasbrouck and Tinsley also refused to testify when subpoenaed, invoking their privilege against self-incrimination. Schoenbach said he told his client to not answer any questions except to give his name and address. Answering any other question, he said, would waive the privilege entirely.

On Schoenbach’s advice, Schoenbach said in the interview, Hasbrouck also chose not to sue Kennedy for defamation. Hasbrouck, a college graduate and Army veteran who worked as a technician for ABC television for 30 years, preferred to remain a private citizen.

“I told him he would become a public figure and your life would be upended forever,” Schoenbach said. “Once you fall in the rabbit hole, you can never come back.”

“The two men confessed repeatedly to Bryant and a third man that they had committed the crime.”

This is almost certainly false. Kennedy takes Bryant’s word that the two men, shortly after the murder, bragged they had attacked a woman: “We’ve achieved one of our fantasies. … We got her cave man style.” In interviews with Kennedy and the Michael Skakel investigator, Bryant claimed that they never mentioned a name and that he had kept this conversation secret for 27 years, with one exception. He says he told his mother at the time and she told him to keep away from Hasbrouck and Tinsley. (Bryant’s mother testified that she found Hasbrouck and Tinsley “attractive, mannerly, shy and respectful.” She said she first learned of her son’s alleged involvement from reading a magazine article “in recent years.”) As noted, a judge did not find Bryant’s testimony credible.

“Not even Martha Moxley’s closest friends have any recollection of any association between Moxley and Bryant, Hasbrouck and Tinsley,” Judge Karazin wrote. “No one puts Martha Moxley in the company of Bryant and his companions on the night of October 30, 1975.” There is no indication Michael Skakel was friends with Bryant and his companions.

Statements to a third party are not necessarily reliable, let alone a confession. In his book, Kennedy disputes several instances of witnesses claiming that Skakel confessed to the murder, such as an alleged statement that ‘‘I am going to get away with murder; I am a Kennedy.”

It’s unclear who the “third man” Kennedy refers to is. In his 2007 deposition, Kennedy claimed that Jeffrey Burns, who was 11 at the time of the murder and died at 16, was part of a foursome — including Bryant, Hasbrouck and Tinsley — for whom “it was sexual violence that was contemplated” on the night of Moxley’s murder. Kennedy does not mention Burns in his book but does refer to a Geoff Byrne, also said to be 11. (The difference in the spelling may be an error in the transcript.) In his book, Kennedy writes that Byrne told Bryant that Hasbrouck and Tinsley stayed overnight at his house on the night of the murder. Bryant speculated that Byrne was present when the murder occurred. Kennedy paints a portrait of a child troubled by the events who died at 16, either through a drug overdose or suffocation in a water bed.

In a 2003 interview with the Associated Press, Greg Byrne said it was “convenient” that his dead brother would be named as the local connection for two youths from the Bronx, given that at the time of the murder he was repeatedly questioned by police and never mentioned being with Bryant or his friends.

“It seems extremely far-fetched to me that there was anybody in Belle Haven that wasn’t from the neighborhood and went unnoticed and uncommented on,” Greg Byrne said. “The place was crawling with people on the lookout for mischief. It boggles the mind to think that these kids were there that night and nobody noticed them. What are they, ghosts?”

“Bryant’s testimony resulted in the release of Michael Skakel from prison.”

This is false. Winning a new trial on the basis of Bryant’s testimony was rejected all the way up to the Connecticut Supreme Court (with one justice dissenting). Skakel was released for an entirely different reason — that his trial lawyer failed to represent him properly. In particular, the state high court found, the attorney failed to investigate or seek testimony from a possible alibi witness who was not related to Skakel.

At the trial, the prosecution successfully convinced the jury that none of Skakel’s supposed alibi witnesses could be believed because they were all siblings or first cousins of the defendant — “not a single independent alibi witness”’ — and thus were part of a decades-long conspiracy to cover up the truth. But it turned out Skakel’s attorney made no effort to locate the “beau” of one of the witnesses, Denis Ossorio. According to the state high court, it’s possible he could have provided disinterested corroboration of Skakel’s alibi that he was watching television at a friend’s home at the time of the murder, and thus should have been contacted by the defense as part of its investigation.

Send us facts to check by filling out this form