Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted Tuesday night to riding on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet twice in the 1990s, saying that his wife knew Epstein’s wife, Ghislaine Maxwell.
“I was on it in 1993 and I was on it—and I went to Florida with my wife and two children to visit my mom over Easter,” RFK Jr. told Fox News. “My wife had some kind of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell and they offered us a ride to Palm Beach.”
“And on another occasion, I flew again with my family, with I think four of my children and Mary, my wife, to Rapid City, South Dakota to go fossil hunting for a weekend,” he continued. “But otherwise I was never on his jet alone. I’ve been very open about this from the beginning, this was in ’93, so it was 30 years ago. It was before anybody knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s, you know, his nefarious issues.”
Epstein’s jet has gained notoriety for its role in allegedly transporting underage girls to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands for sex.
Politicians’ ties to Epstein, the prominent financier who died in prison while awaiting sex trafficking charges, have been heavily scrutinized and fodder for conspiracies.
Former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, two former Democratic senators, and Prince Andrew are among those who have rode on the now-notorious jet. Simply riding on the jet, however, does not imply that they participated or had any knowledge of Epstein’s illicit sexual affairs.
The jet’s longtime pilot, Larry Visoski, testified he never witnessed any sexual activity aboard the plane but that he frequently flew to Epstein’s island.
Epstein separately was convicted more than a decade before his death for soliciting prostitution from a minor and was registered as a sex offender as a result. Maxwell, his former girlfriend, was sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years in prison for aiding Epstein’s sex trafficking efforts.
RFK Jr.’s comments come as Republicans push the Federal Bureau of Investigation to release Epstein’s flight records.
“There are disturbing allegations that the FBI failed to investigate the sex trafficking allegations and indeed one survivor says that the FBI, even after she brought forward repeatedly content about his conduct, that the FBI refused to investigate her claims, even though she said the allegations were there on both the sex trafficking and the child sexual abuse material,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said at a Senate Judiciary Committee panel on Tuesday.
In his interview, RFK Jr. agreed “all of this information should be released and we should get real answers on what happened to Jeffrey Epstein,” referencing rumors that Epstein’s suicide while in prison was part of a cover-up effort.
“Any of the high-level of the political people that he was involved with, all of that should be open to the public, it should be absolutely transparent,” RFK Jr. added. “I don’t see why any of those records would have any redactions in them, why would we be hiding that from the American public?”
