Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been thwarted in his attempts to sue a blogger who criticized him on social media for defamation after a judge ruled that he didn’t have enough evidence.
Kennedy has tried for years to sue blogger David Vickery for libel after he reported that he once shared a stage with neo-Nazis in Berlin while speaking at an anti-lockdown rally during the COVID pandemic in 2020.
However, after a protracted four-year court battle, which saw Kennedy file lawsuits against both Vickery and publisher The Daily Kos, a judge ruled on Tuesday that the lawsuit against Kos was officially dead in the water.
The reason for the dismissal? RFK Jr.’s legal team refused to deny the central premise of Vickery’s report during summary judgment — that the health secretary had indeed appeared alongside neo-Nazis at the event in Berlin.
In court documents seen by The Daily Kos, Kennedy’s lawyers did not dispute the fact that RFK Jr. appeared at a protest organized and attended by groups with neo-Nazi affiliations such as the AfD and NDP, but instead claimed that it was defamatory to infer that by appearing at their rally, he had joined those groups as a member — a claim Vickery never made.
Elsewhere in the lawsuit, Kennedy alleged that Vickery had made a number of additional defamatory statements about him on social media, including that he “wanted to cause the death of all Black people” and that he “said COVID-19 was designed to save Jewish people.”
But these claims were methodically dismissed by the judge as gross misrepresentations of actual events. The allegation about wanting to “cause the death” of Black people was, in reality, nothing more than a link posted without comment by Vikrey to an opinion piece titled “Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is harming Black people—and his family legacy—with his vaccine misinformation campaign,” published by African American news outlet TheGrio.
Similarly, the claim about COVID being “designed to save Jewish people” was, in actuality, a shared link to a Washington Post article headlined “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests COVID was designed to spare Jews,” which was again posted by Vickery without further comment.
In his ruling, the judge noted that Kennedy provided “no admissible record evidence” to disprove Vickery’s claim that he merely “repeated third-party content without embellishment.”
“I’m glad the court decided in my favor,” said Vickery. “There was really no merit to the whole case.”
Delivering his verdict, Democrat-appointed Justice Thomas McKeon wrote, “Plaintiff offers no evidence that there exists a defamatory implication that plaintiff joining the protest as a speaker meant that he joined the sponsoring group as a member of that group.”
He added, “The only inference that could be made is that Kennedy and these groups shared the same position on government COVID vaccination requirements… The court does not see a defamatory implication.”
A separate, ongoing appeal by Daily Kos seeks to establish a broader legal precedent in New York to protect media outlets from similar lawsuits.
In a blog post celebrating the ruling, the outlet’s editorial wrote, “RFK Jr. is a dangerous loon who cavorts with neo-Nazis, and he can go f— himself.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the legal representatives of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for further comment.
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