Cheryl Hines Calls Husband Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Invoking Anne Frank in Vaccines Speech “Reprehensible”
Cheryl Hines is weighing in after her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., invoked the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in a recent speech about vaccine mandates.
During a Washington, D.C., anti-vax rally on Sunday, Kennedy suggested that the situation is worse today for those in the U.S. who oppose vaccine mandates than it was for Anne Frank, who hid from the Nazis with her family in a secret compartment within an Amsterdam home for two years before dying in a concentration camp in 1945.
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“Even in Hitler Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy, a vocal critic of vaccines, said at the event. “Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, and none of us can hide.”
After footage of the speech went viral on social media and was met with widespread criticism, a Twitter user tagged Hines to ask the actress if she stands by her husband.
“My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own,” the Curb Your Enthusiasm star replied via Twitter on Monday. “While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.”
After another Twitter user tweeted that Hines should have said her husband was “wrong” to compare the vaccine situation to the Holocaust, the actress replied, “Yes, I agree with you.”
Hines, who wed Kennedy in 2014, later wrote that her initial tweet was “Nothing about WW II.” When asked to further clarify what her initial tweet was addressing, she posted, “I was responding to, ‘Do you stand with your husband.'”
After these initial exchanges, Hines posted a statement to her Twitter account calling Kennedy’s comments “reprehensible and insensitive.”
“My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive,” she wrote. “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything.”
Among the responses to Kennedy’s speech was a statement posted to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Twitter account Sunday that condemned his remarks as “outrageous and deeply offensive.”
Kennedy also apologized on Tuesday morning, via Twitter, for his reference to Frank, saying he was “especially” sorry “to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors.”
“My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control,” he added. “To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”
Jan. 25, 10:54 a.m. Updated with Hines’ tweet clarifying her response.
Jan. 25, 11:58 am. Updated with Kennedy’s apology.
This story was originally published on Jan. 24, 2022, at 9:12 p.m.
