Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jeffrey Epstein

Explore More

Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. was on such good terms with Jeffrey Epstein that he had free use of the billionaire pedophile’s Manhattan office in 1993 — and partied with him at The Pierre, The Post has learned.

The disclosure raises questions about just how transparent the 69-year-old independent candidate has been about his relationship with the infamous pervert — which only came to light this Tuesday in an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters.

Kennedy acknowledged two trips on Epstein’s private plane, claiming he went on it in 1993 to Florida and at another time, to go “fossil hunting” in South Dakota, both times flying with children and adding: “I was never on his jet alone.”

And he claimed it was his second wife Mary Richardson Kennedy who had “some kind of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell,” Epstein’s jailed madam who procured his victims and in the early 1990s was his girlfriend. Richardson took her own life in 2012.

Kennedy’s admission came a month after he told Newsweek he had only been on Epstein’s jet once.

But even his new account appears at odds with the depth of the relationship between Kennedy and Epstein described by a longtime family friend, Christina Oxenberg.

It also appears at odds with Kennedy’s own private life.

He claimed Tuesday that his trip to Florida in 1993 on the so-called “Lolita Express” was with “my wife and two children to visit my mom over Easter.”

A spokesman told The Post that the “wife” being referred to was Mary Richardson — but in 1993, Kennedy was married to, and had two children with, Emily Ruth Black.

They divorced the next year, and he married his pregnant lover Mary Richardson a month later, going on to have a total of four children with her.

“Bobby never could keep dates or wives straight,” said a source who knows the Kennedy family. “They were irrelevant to him.”

Kennedy was close enough to Epstein that the billionaire had a long entry for “Kennedy, Bobby & Mary” in his “little black book,” which featured contacts for socialites and politicians as well as the young girls whom he sexually assaulted.

Other Kennedys also featured in the book, including RFK Jr.’s mother Ethel and cousin Maria Shriver.

Kennedy’s campaign brushed off any suggestion that he knew at the time that Epstein was running a sex-trafficking ring, nor did they answer questions about the use of Epstein’s office in 1993.

“Those trips took place approximately 30 years ago, long before Mr. Epstein’s criminal behavior was public knowledge, a spokesperson for Kennedy told The Post.

The spokesperson said Kennedy “adds his voice to those demanding clarity about all of Mr. Epstein’s nefarious activities, including the identities of powerful partners or shady entities who may have enabled or participated in his crimes.”

However it is Oxenberg’s account which may raise most questions over RFK’s attempt to minimize his Epstein connection — because it describes how Maxwell was part of Kennedy’s family circle long before his affair with Mary Richardson began.

Oxenberg is a member of the deposed Serbian royal family — Britain’s Prince Andrew is a second cousin — while her sister is the Hollywood actress Catherine Oxenberg. Their father, Howard Oxenberg, was a longtime close friend of the Kennedy clan, including Pres. John F. Kennedy.

In a 2021 book, “Trash: Encounters with Ghislaine Maxwell,” Oxenberg revealed that she first met Maxwell in 1990, at the Washington, DC, society wedding of Kennedy’s sister Kerry to Andrew Cuomo, who would go on to become governor of New York state. Mary Richardson was Kerry’s maid of honor.

“I was standing with my then-husband, Damian Elwes, a British painter, when Ghislaine sauntered over,” Oxenberg wrote about the encounter at the wedding reception at Ethel Kennedy’s Hickory Hill home in McLean, VA on June 9, 1990.

Maxwell, in fact, appears to have first cultivated the Kennedys in 1989, Oxenberg wrote, when Kerry and Michael were guests at a glittering party in Washington, DC, on the Lady Ghislaine, the yacht owned by Maxwell’s father Robert, the British press baron.

At the time he had bought Macmillan Publishing for $2.6bn and was trying to impress DC’s powerbrokers, hiring public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to secure A-list guests such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the then-CIA director William Webster, for the party on the 185-foot boat docked on the Potomac.

Robert Maxwell also partied in New York, cultivating the rising property developer Donald Trump, and used Ghislaine, his youngest and favorite child as his American ambassador.

But in 1991 he plunged to his death from the yacht, his empire collapsed, and he was revealed to have looted millions from it, prompting his daughter to flee English society and set up home in New York.

By the next year, 1992, she was dating Epstein and was also a presence on the social scene.

Then in 1993, Oxenberg related how Kennedy hired her and another woman, named only as “Jane,” to produce an event for him that involved then-New York City mayor David Dinkins.

“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 get the ball rolling. I already borrowed an office for you to work from,'” she wrote.

The office space turned out to be Epstein’s “suite of offices on Madison Avenue” where Oxenberg and the associate identified operated out of a “large and comfy conference room.”

Epstein’s companies were registered to 457 Madison Avenue, opposite the rear of St. Patrick’s Cathedral; public records show Maxwell later used it as an address too.

“The office was populated by several female executive assistants, all of them in their early 20s and looking like flight attendants from yesteryear with tidy buns, high heels and short tight-skirted suits,” writes Oxenberg, adding that Maxwell and Epstein frequently showed up in the shared space.

“They mostly talked about their jet, or name-dropped the people they were ‘meeting’ with.”

One day, Maxwell told Oxenberg that she had arranged for Kennedy to take a ride in Epstein’s private jet.

“Ghislaine made a point of telling me she had arranged to take Bobby Kennedy Jr. on a day trip in the plane,” wrote Oxenberg.

“She got it exactly right by offering him a trip out West to see dinosaur bones. She almost always knew who liked what; she knew how to sell.

Epstein stayed on the plane during the South Dakota trip, and on the way back to New York, he insisted on making a stop in Chicago “where a beautiful blonde boarded the plane,” wrote Oxenberg, adding that Epstein got off the plane with the woman.

“It might have been as long as two hours that Bobby and the children waited on the plane before Jeffrey reappeared without the blonde,” she writes.

“For sure, Epstein had no interest in looking at dinosaur bones, but he did want a Kennedy on his plane.”

Kennedy told Fox of the fossil-hunting trip: “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.”

However he did not have a total of four children until 1995, when his daughter Kyra was born.

And a photo from 1994 also shows Kennedy and Epstein chatting amiably at an event at the Pierre.

In the decades before his death, Epstein avidly cultivated the rich, powerful and politically-connected.

He partied with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, flew Bill Clinton repeatedly on the “Lolita Express,” and is alleged to have allowed Prince Andrew to have sex with one of his victims when she was 17. Andrew has denied that but paid her a multi-million dollar settlement.

Epstein, who was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in Florida in 2008 but given a sweetheart deal, was federally charged with sex-trafficking in July 2019. He died in his Manhattan jail cell in August, a death ruled to be suicide by hanging.

Oxenberg, in her book, articulated a theory that Epstein cultivated the powerful to entrap them by putting them in compromising situations with the young women he employed.

“It was Ghislaine’s job to make it happen, to entice Robert Kennedy Jr. into his trap,” Oxenberg wrote.

“The snag was that Kennedy showed up at the private airport with a group of kids and they were not the type Jeffrey had a predilection for.”

ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlf3R7kGtmaXBfo7K4v46poJyspaeypXnRqJmeqqRis263xKelnpypYrezecCnm2ailZuzs7HYZpypq6Satq97