Nicole Shanahan, running mate to independent presidential candidate and vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says a widely aggregated New York Times report spanning everything from admittedly fun drugs to a noted Twitter ruiner is “a hit piece.”
As you may or may not have seen earlier this week, the Times’ piece credited to reporter Kirsten Grind alleges that Shanahan recreationally used ketamine with Elon Musk at a party in 2021, with several sources claiming that the two also had “a sexual encounter” that year. Shortly after the alleged party in question, Shanahan’s then-husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, was reported to have filed for divorce. In fact, the Times piece claims that Shanahan’s alleged billion-dollar stature comes mostly from said split.
To be clear, the alleged Muskery was previously thrust into the news cycle back in 2022. At the time, Musk called such claims “total BS” and asserted that he remained “friends” with Brin.
“I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around,” he said that July. “Nothing romantic.”
Elsewhere in the Times piece, available in full here, it’s alleged that Shanahan, who indeed has never held public office (though positing such a descriptor as some kind of a shock amid the shitshow of present-day American politics seems dangerously naive, at best, and downright delusional at worst), also indulged in coke and shrooms during her marriage to Brin.
Drugs, of course, are not in and of themselves a sign of anything inherently negative. Moreover, lumping mere shrooms in with actual drugs is pretty dumb. But the pile-on here has little to do with that, and is more about further dunking on a baffling campaign that, as touched on above, has a direct connection to truly dangerous vaccine-related conspiracies. As for the Kennedy family at large, many have used their collective platform to speak out against RFK Jr.’s views over the years. In April, more than a dozen Kennedy family members were confirmed to have endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket for 2024.
“Bobby and I get inquiries, from reporters, like this daily,” Shanahan said in a tweet shared Friday. “They seem less and less focused on the issues facing the American people.”
