John, Bobby ... and Marilyn

Exploring an Infamous Kennedy Conspiracy

Jul 27, 2024

Over the years, it has come to my attention that a very large number of people have embraced the narrative that Bobby Kennedy and his brother conspired to murder Marilyn Monroe, whose body was found naked in her bed on the morning of August 4, 1962, with the official cause of death labelled ‘self-induced barbituate overdose’.

Recent Netflix films like ‘The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes” released in 2022 have added fuel to the fires that have helped cure millions of Americans of their romantic memories of John and Bobby Kennedy, who were featured as the purported organizers of Marilyn’s untimely murder.

Covert Action Magazine jumped on the bandwagon, with an article titled ‘New Evidence Suggests Marilyn Monroe Was Murdered and LAPD Covered Up Murder,’ and even my good buddy Hrvoje Morik recently embraced this narrative.

How should those who may be on the fence regarding this topic deal with the argument that the Kennedy brothers, so long beloved heroes of America, murdered Marilyn Monroe?

How would we know where to start forming a responsible judgement of the actress’s untimely death and the Kennedy role therein, when lies permeate the information landscape with intelligence agencies often supporting contradicting sides of popular narratives to many topics of history?

A Matter of Method: Storytelling

Everyone loves stories.

Storytelling represents a huge power that resonates to the basic needs of the soul. But obviously, this power that awakens our imagination, gives us access to the deep past as well as the deep future, while touching the deepest fabric of existence, is often highly misused by powerful forces which have seen fit to treat storytelling as a form of magic to charm the minds of the masses into controlled cages.

So, as we begin to evaluate the available facts, I advise we begin with the following three basic criteria for judging which facts to discard, which facts to hold tentatively and which facts to embrace during the course of our inquiry:

1) Who are the sources being cited to pass judgement on any topic?

2) What evidence is being brought to the court of my internal judgement? (ie: Is what is being presented as evidence something that can be validated, or based simply based on hearsay, self-referential testimonials and gossip?)

3) Do these facts mesh with a larger contextual dynamic which we can know shapes history, or do these new facts create dissonances… and if they create dissonances, then what form do those dissonances express?

Are those dissonances legitimate (ie: which would mean that their existence demands that we put our entire worldview into question, or are they illegitimate and gossip-based?)

In the case of the popular narratives of "RFK and JFK killed Marilyn”—which have become an industry unto themselves with Netflix documentaries, PBS documentaries and countless books and articles that find themselves on New York Times best sellers lists, I can say that those narratives are fishy as hell, and raise tons of alarm bells.

A few red alarms of note

For one thing, the actual cited evidence that “Bobby killed Marilyn” sits atop:

1) Anecdotal testimonies from a closed array of sources whom we should believe because we can't imagine any personal profit motive to them and

2) The supposed “hard” evidence of tape recordings of Marilyn's bugged house, which no one has seen or heard except the guy who bugged her house (Fred Otash) who was both a contractor for the FBI and CIA, while also working for the Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa.

FBI/CIA contractor and mob advisor Fred Otash

Commenting on the 650 interviews collected by Oxford-trained BBC superstar Anthony Summers (aka: the youngest BBC producer in history,) which were used in the Netflix film ‘The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe’, professor Sarah Churchwell wrote, “the interviews often repeated second or third hand accounts of what someone else said, and neither Summers nor his sources is particularly dispassionate.”

Indeed, Summers has a lot to lose by allowing the edifice of Bobby’s murder of Marilyn to fall—especially since he himself has played such a leading role constructing the narrative since his 1985 New York Times best selling book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe”.

Then we have her secret diary entries which no one has seen except for anonymous sources acquired by the strange figure of Mike Rothmiller, of whom much more will be said below.

Neither do we know who this secret source was, nor has anyone but this secret source actually read these supposedly-existent diary pages, but we are expected to believe in their existence, because the storyline for this elegant drama simply doesn’t work without them.

Within her secret diary, a motive is supposedly provided for the question, ‘WHY would the Kennedy brothers want Marilyn Monroe dead in the first place?!’

Marilyn’s Invisible Diary Claims

We consumers of soap opera drama are promised that these supposedly-existent diaries that no one has actually seen PROVE not only the sordid sexual dalliances enjoyed by the Kennedy Brothers with their mutual mistress, BUT that they also contain mind blowing information which the Kennedys revealed to Marilyn amidst their pillow talk.

Some of those claims include, but are not limited to:

1) JFK's plans to topple Castro

2) JFK's drug addiction

3) RFK's controlling hand behind the invasion of Cuba

4) JFK's intention to increase troops into Vietnam

5) JFK's directing role overseeing the assassination of President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and President Diem of South Korea

6) Bobby Kennedy's role overseeing Murder Inc (ie: the global assassination complex that was managed by US intelligence, paramilitary orders, pentagon, and organized crime etc)... oh, yeah, and

7) RFK's plans to oversee an inside job killing American civilians to justify an invasion of Cuba.

Setting the Record Straight

Here, I call bullshit.

These are quite ironic claims, since John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were in fact THE ONLY GUYS who were against the toppling of Castro, and who worked like hell to subvert the Bay of Pigs invasion (which was itself set into motion by the Dulles brothers during President Eisenhower's last weeks in office).

And rather than expanding US engagement in Vietnam, John and Robert Kennedy fought tooth and nail against the entire Deep State of the USA on starting a new forever war outlined in his June 10, 1963 speech, ‘What Kind of Peace Do We Seek? ‘

To this end, Kennedy introduced NSAM 263 in October 1963 to begin a full withdrawal from Southeast Asia; he was assassinated one month later.

As early as 1962, he had been coordinating this extraction with President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam who was murdered on November 2, 1963… only three weeks prior to JFK's own murder.

JFK was pissed when President Diem was murdered by the same CIA that was to oversee his own assassination very soon, and yet, which we are expected to believe was itself controlled by the Kennedys to kill their enemies (as those who promote the Marilyn secret diaries profess)...

On this last point of Bobby Kennedy’s supposed support for a new "Maine incident," (aka: a type false flag to justify the invasion of Cuba akin to what had been done to justify the Spanish American war in the Philippines in 1899)… that was actually Operation Northwoods, which was proposed NOT by the Kennedys, but rather by General Lyman Lemnitzer, and which had the support of the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA.

Horrified at this insidious proposal, JFK rejected Northwoods, and soon fired Lemnitzer.

undefined — Operation Northwoods memorandum (13 March 1962)

After General Lemnitzer was flushed by Kennedy for proposing this atrocity, the general found a shiny new position as the head of NATO, working closely with the same unreconstructed Nazis of NATO's secret armies, managing the actual murders of Diem, Trujillo, Lumumba, Mattei AND JFK and RFK and MLK etc.

In ‘Preserving the Presidency’, historian Anton Chaitkin writes,

“Lyman Lemnitzer, defeated in the Cuban Missile Crisis and sacked as Joint Chiefs’ chairman—but not incarcerated—went over to Paris as head of NATO military forces. Lemnitzer inherited a continent-wide covert apparatus of Mafia killers, Hitler Nazis and Mussolini fascists, French colonial diehards, and white mercenaries fuming about the loss of Africa.
This was the “stay-behind” network he had seen constructed after World War II by the British Secret Service, with help from Dulles and logistical support by himself. It was not until October 1990 that Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti rocked the political world by revealing the existence of this covert network, which came to be called after the name for its Italian section, “Gladio.”

Fred Otash’s Invisible Wiretaps

Now we have debunked some of the claims which are supposedly made by those few who have seen Marilyn’s secret diary.

But despite being debunked, many true believers will still assert that this diary must exist, or else why did Bobby Kennedy allegedly go to her home on the day of her murder? After all, according to all of the “Kennedy killed Marilyn” narratives, we are told that Bobby was at her home because her house was bugged by a private investigator. In these recordings that apparently exist, we are told they contain audio of Bobby threatening Marilyn’s life unless she gave up those compromising diaries.

Utilizing the art of circular reasoning at its finest, one non-existent piece of evidence (aka: Marilyn’s diary) is “proven” to exist “because” of another non-existent piece of evidence (aka: the wiretapped recordings of her house).

To restate this fact explicitly: NO ONE has ever heard these supposed wiretaps, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed.

In fact, the ONLY source professing they exist is private investigator Fred Otash. This is the same dirty Hollywood P.I who had been contracted by the CIA, worked for the mafia and famously stated, “I’ll work for anybody but communists. I’ll do anything short of murder.”

Monroe biographer April VeVea noted that Fred Otash had never said a word publicly about bugging Marilyn’s home until Anthony Summers published his own sensational book tying the Kennedys to her murder, twenty-three years later.

VeVea writes,

“In 1985 Otash first came out with his claims that he had wired Marilyn’s home, had heard her killed, etc. These tapes have never been released…. Only after many people had come out of the woodwork did Otash come out and say that he had bugged her apartment (see Anthony Summer’s Goddess, 1985) as well as her home on 12305 5th Helena Drive. There has never been any bugging equipment found...”

So now let’s shift gears a bit and have a look at another principle minister of this narrative named Mike Rothmiller.

Mike Rothmiller: Spook for Hire

Over the years, Mike Rothmiller has written over 26 books, and is the global pre-eminent authority on this narrative since the early 1980s.

His official biography boasts of having worked for the FBI, CIA, US Secret Service, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence and of course Scotland Yard, Mossad, Interpol and the Canadian RCMP.

His bio also notes that "he has conceived and directed" global intelligence operations focusing on anti-terrorism.

As I wrote in A Brief History of Domestic Terrorism: From Cointel Pro to 9/11 and Beyond, not a single case of ‘naturally emerging’ terrorism (either domestic or foreign) can be found in any case over the past half century without a coordinating hand of western intelligence agencies managing operations from behind the scenes.

Mike Rothmiller is a New York Times darling whose books are all NY Times best sellers, and he organized and testified at the "secret grand jury" trial of the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, which of course made no mention of MK Ultra, close range bullet holes in the back of RFK's neck, or any higher conspiracy outside of the "Sirhan Sirhan lone gunman" line.

In a recent interview, Bobby Kennedy’s son stated that "the people that were closest to [Sirhan], the people that disarmed him all said he never got near my father."

He also described Sirhan’s trial as “really a penalty hearing. It wasn't a real trial. At a full trial, they would have litigated his guilt or innocence. I think it's unfortunate that the case never went to a full trial because that would have compelled the press and prosecutors to focus on the glaring discrepancies in the narrative that Sirhan fired the shots that killed my father.”

Additionally, Mike Rothmiller has been sold as "the Serpico" of LAPD whose exposes of corruption have resulted in shutting down entire sections of LAPD intelligence branches in the early 1990s.

Why am I supposed to believe that this was a good thing? Should I presume that Rothmiller’s thesis that all of the LAPD intelligence agents were corrupt and ignore the fact that men like former LAPD intelligence officer Mike Rupert (who exposed CIA controls of narcotic operations in America) didn’t exist?

I also can't ignore that Rothmiller has been rewarded massively by becoming an executive of three SONY departments, a producer, a host of PBS and ESPN while overseeing dozens of documentaries and television shows, making him a vast influencer of the modern zeitgeist. Rothmiller also played a key role in Netflix films on Marilyn Monroe and other historical topics, and we shouldn't be confused about the nature of Netflix, nor its founder and president, the grand-nephew of Edward Bernays.

NOW, let me say that I positively agree that Marilyn was murdered.

Her psychiatrist and involvement in MK Ultra connecting Monarch operations is a likely reason, and amidst the voluminous ‘Bobby Kennedy killed Marilyn exposes’ illustrated by Otash, Summers Rothmiller or Netflix, I have yet to encounter one reference to MK Ultra or its Tavistockian management, or the broader satanic takeover of Hollywood that was fully underway during the 1960s.

The Battle over the Soul of Hollywood

This combat that Marilyn was enmeshed within is never discussed in any of the gossipy narratives going viral these days. It is no secret that the Kennedys were heavily invested in this fight over the soul of Hollywood during these precarious years, as I outlined in Kirk Douglas, Trumbo and JFK: When Hollywood Patriots Resisted the Deep State.

It is a fact that Bobby Kennedy had communications with Marilyn while Fox Pictures was suing her for breaching her contract and creating a new production studio to give her control over her creative work, but why presume this communication was evidence of a sexual relationship?

Describing Marilyn’s struggle to battle Hollywood studios and her pioneering role creating her own studio, Maureen Lee Lenker writes,

“It [Marilyn Monroe Productions] gave her a nearly unmatched power, allowing a star of her stature to control her own career rather than being at the mercy of a capricious studio and its mogul. Already weakened, the studio system could not withstand losing its hold on its most valuable assets, its stars… Monroe even kickstarted a trend, with stars such as Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, and Barbra Streisand following in her self-determining path in the years to come.”

Bobby and John Kennedy also interfaced closely with director John Frankenheimer, with whom they gave access to White House grounds to film Seven Days in May (documenting the planned military coup in the USA then being led by Lyman Lemnitzer).

Bobby was also close to Judy Garland, who starred in the Oscar winning picture of 1960, Judgement at Nuremburg, which exposed Wall Street bankers behind the rise of Hitler and eugenics prior to World War II.

Yet for some reason, all of this is ignored when we are fed juicy morsels of gossip about the deviant sex lives of both Kennedy brothers and Marilyn Monroe.

Judy Garland and John F. Kennedy at a Democratic National Convention.

The Evidence Again

When evaluating the evidence surrounding the lives and deaths of both Kennedy brothers, I can see two brave and cultured young American leaders who were assassinated at the prime of their lives, with high level coordination between the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service. After their mortal bodies were killed, both young men then suffered a second wave of character assassinations, which I can see are clearly tied directly to the FBI, CIA and British intelligence.

The narratives pushed by these agencies utilize a slimy technique of citing evidence and sources that no one has seen or heard, but is assumed to exist by anonymous sources who themselves are tied to the FBI, CIA and British intelligence to varying degrees.

Perhaps someone might read what I have written above and still state: BUT dozens of people wouldn't tell a lie so consistently about Bobby and John Kennedy, would they? And there are so many details to their narratives that no one could make such details up, could they? Why would anyone lie about something like this?

I'm sorry, but that sort of thinking resulted in a lot of people getting killed through false trials during centuries of inquisitions, witch hunts, Jacobin terror trials and McCarthyism, so I now have enough common sense to NOT play any games that demand that I give my convictions over to narratives that have gossip, anonymous sources, or evidence that no one knows exists at their core.

I have already conducted a similar study into the popular claims that “Martin Luther King Jr. was a rapist, sex maniac,” and so far, everything I have read about the “Bobby and John Kennedy sex fiend, imperial murderers of Marilyn Monroe” theories fall apart when I apply a bit of discernment to the thesis.

Supplementary Reading

The World Desperately Needs the Wisdom of Bobby Kennedy Now More Than Ever

For Martin Luther King Day: Let us End his 2nd Assassination

Preserving the Presidency: JFK and the Military Industrial Complex

A Damned Murder Inc: Kennedy’s Battle Against the Leviathan

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

Matthew Ehret is the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. He has written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. He is also co-host of The Multipolar Reality on Rogue News and Breaking History on Badlands Media.

If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of Matthew’s work for free on Substack.

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