RFK Jr. May Have Made Up Wild Story About Bow-And-Arrow Ambush, Throwing Dynamite

In the early 1980s, Robert Kennedy Jr. told a story to journalists about being ambushed in a bow-and-arrow attack by Indigenous people during a 1974 whitewater rafting trip in Peru.

Kennedy’s account of the incident, which is detailed in the 1984 book “The Kennedys: An American Drama ,” describes how one of his friends was nearly hit in the leg with an arrow, which penetrated a canteen nearby. Kennedy said he and his cousin, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, retaliated by picking up a stick of dynamite they found, lighting it and throwing it at their attackers:

It’s a wild story from Kennedy, who is currently running for president as an independent — and it also appears to be wildly exaggerated or entirely made up.

Lawford, who died in 2018, offered a brief and far less dramatic account of this incident in his 2005 memoir , ” Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption .” He made no mention of a near-miss arrow strike or dynamite.

He wrote only: “We floated by Indian villages, once having to avoid the arrows being shot in our direction by a drunken tribe on the shore.”

A longtime Kennedy friend who was alsoon the rafting trip, Blake Fleetwood, said as soon as the 1984 book came out that the incident never happened.

“Fleetwood said yesterday that the river was calm, and that the Indian attack never occurred,” according to a 1984 Washington Post article about the Kennedy book. In the same article, Fleetwood said a number of Kennedy’s other claims in the book were distorted or “just fantasy.”

Kennedy’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether he stands by his detailed account of the bow-and-arrow ambush. A request for comment from Fleetwood was not immediately returned.

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