Weeks after Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, died after a brief cancer battle, her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is giving insight into the family members’ estranged relationship.
“Everybody’s praying for them,” the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) told People of his family while attending the Starry Night Gala in Palm Desert, California, on Saturday, January 31.
When asked if he has spoken to his cousin in the wake of her daughter’s death, RFK Jr. told the outlet, “Not recently.”
Schlossberg died on December 30, 2025, following a terminal cancer diagnosis. She was 35.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the JFK Library Foundation shared in a statement via Instagram at the time, signed by Tatiana’s surviving husband, George Moran, their two children, Edwin, 3, and Josephine, 19 months, her parents, Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline, her siblings, Jack and Rose Schlossberg, and her sister-in-law, Rory Schlossberg.
Tatiana died a little over a month after she revealed she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and given a year to live.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew,” Tatiana wrote in an essay for The New Yorker, revealing her diagnosis. “I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of.”
RFK Jr., Caroline Kennedy Getty Images
In the same essay, Tatiana criticized her cousin RFK Jr. for his anti-vaccination, anti-science views.
“In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to ‘let Bobby go wild’ on health,” Tatiana wrote at the time. “My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”
The journalist recalled feeling like the entire health care system was “strained [and] shaky” at the exact moment she was reliant on round-the-clock care.
“Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available,” she added. “My dad, who grew up in New York City in the 1940s and ‘50s, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.”
RFK Jr. has been estranged from many of his Kennedy family members for years and since his endorsement of President Donald Trump in August 2024.
“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,” five Kennedy family members said in a statement at the time. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
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