In January, some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest supporters gathered at the tony London Hotel in West Hollywood to celebrate his 70th birthday and raise money for a super PAC supporting his independent presidential campaign.
Even with a slew of famous names present, the evening’s emotional apex came from Gavin de Becker, bodyguard to the stars, who is simultaneously one of the candidate’s biggest donors and vendors and Kennedy’s personal friend and security guru.
“I don’t know if there was a dry face in the room after he spoke,” said Holly Baird, a Hollywood crisis communications consultant who is now engagement director for Kennedy’s campaign. “He put it really clear how he feels about Bobby and he put us all to task that he is here to protect Bobby and to support all of us.”
Personal protection is a sensitive issue for Kennedy, whose famous father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, President John F. Kennedy, were both killed by assassins’ bullets in the 1960s. Kennedy has faced his own threats, which de Becker has validated publicly. But de Becker’s role goes far beyond Kennedy’s physical protection — and his entrance into the 2024 presidential campaign illuminates the unusual mix of ideologies, personalities and origin stories drawn to Kennedy’s unusual bid for the White House.
Like many in Kennedy’s inner orbit and his broader base of support, de Becker shares his deep skepticism of the medical establishment and of vaccines, concerns that most medical experts call unfounded.
In hours of public interviews reviewed by NBC News, de Becker, who largely declined to answer questions from NBC News about his life and role in the campaign, rails against the HPV vaccine, accuses the media and pharmaceutical companies of working together to stifle dissent and criticizes former U.S. infectious diseases chief Anthony Fauci.
De Becker’s heterodox political donation record in the years before Kennedy’s presidential bid also illustrates how Kennedy is drawing his coalition from a mix of the left, the right and the politically untethered. De Becker has sporadically donated to Democrats including Barack Obama in 2008 and Andrew Yang in 2020 — but also to former Rep. Ron Paul’s unconventional Republican presidential campaigns and to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s 2022 re-election bid.
As with others, Covid seems to have hardened de Becker’s views. He suffered a deep personal tragedy during the pandemic, blaming lockdowns for the death of his son, whom he has said was unable to receive treatment for leukemia.
Along with Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and conservative billionaire Timothy Mellon, de Becker is one of the primary funders of Kennedy’s super PAC. De Becker’s company is also the single biggest individual recipient of outgoing cash from Kennedy’s campaign, blurring campaign finance lines in ways experts say is highly unusual and without obvious precedent.
And while bodyguards typically try to fade into the background, de Becker stands out. Appearing in a recent campaign video, he argued that Kennedy is standing in the way of the powerful pharmaceutical industry “like a student standing in front of one of those tanks in Tiananmen Square.”
A celebrity bodyguard for celebrities
When actress Olivia Newton-John was victimized by a stalker, she called Gavin de Becker.
When billionaire Jeff Bezos wanted to find out how intimate text messages he sent to his mistress appeared in the tabloids, he called Gavin de Becker.
And when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle moved to America and needed to replace the protection formerly afforded to them by a nuclear-armed sovereign nation, they too called Gavin de Becker.
That star-studded client list and the wealth that came with it made de Becker himself something of a star in his own right, as did his romantic relationships in the 1990s with famous women like actor Geena Davis and singer Alanis Morissette.
But while Kennedy was born into privilege, de Becker started in poverty.
In a 2022 interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” de Becker described a bleak childhood: He said his mother was a heroin addict who shot his stepfather when de Becker was just 10 years old. By the time he moved out of his childhood home, de Becker said, there were nine bullets stuck in the walls and the floor.
“You can sort of draw a straight line between violence in my childhood and what I ultimately did,” he said, “which is became kind of an ambassador between the two worlds, between the world of violence and the world of protection and safety.”
After his mother’s death, de Becker moved in with a childhood friend, the child of actors Rosemary Clooney (George’s aunt) and José Ferrer. That move set him on the path that would transform his life: Within years, he was working as Elizabeth Taylor’s traveling assistant, where he’d gain a crash course in fame and the frenetic world of protecting an international celebrity.
While still in his 20s, he leveraged that experience into national notoriety as a security expert, writing papers that earned him acclaim and a series of speaking engagements. That led to his own eponymous VIP protection agency and a slew of A-list clients, from Cher and John Travolta to Dolly Parton and Barbra Streisand. In 2017, he even opened a private terminal at Los Angeles International Airport where celebrities — and anyone willing to pay for the service — can escape the paparazzi and receive VIP treatment while waiting for their flight.
He’s also worked with law enforcement, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to both the USO Board of Governors and the advisory board to the National Institute of Justice, and wrote numerous books, including bestseller “The Gift of Fear,” which sports blurbs from Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep, Marcia Clark (the lead prosecutor in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial), and his close childhood friend Carrie Fisher. (At Fisher’s memorial service, de Becker said he lost his virginity in her house: “It wasn’t with Carrie, but she arranged it.”)
And while working in a field that prides itself on discretion, de Becker has won the praise of some of the most famous people in the world. Bezos called him “one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know.” Actor Lena Dunham called him “our nation’s greatest feminist” during an appearance she made for his 2022 “master class,” saying he understands “what makes women feel unsafe and what makes women targets.”
A super PAC’s private bank
Now, de Becker is serving as the chief protector — and multimillion-dollar financial lifeline — for a celebrity candidate in Kennedy, one who shares both his passion for the environment and his skepticism of the medical community.
De Becker’s success has allowed him to serve in an unusual role, as something of a private bank for Kennedy’s super PAC. He has provided millions in “bridge funding” on top of what he described, in a text message to NBC News, as about $2 million in “pure donations from me.”
In this highly unusual arrangement, de Becker has donated $14 million to the American Values 2024 super PAC through April, according to the latest round of campaign finance disclosures. But he has received refunds totaling almost $11 million over that same period.
“De Becker has provided important donations totaling more than $14 million, some of which were used for bridge funding. When not needed during some particular period, we returned some money to him,” Tony Lyons, the co-chairman of the super PAC, told NBC News. “He has committed to continue bridge funding ‘until RFK Jr. is elected president.’”
At the same time, de Becker’s company has received almost $3 million from the Kennedy campaign itself through April, plus billed the campaign for another $1.2 million that has not yet been paid, according to campaign finance reports.
That $4.2 million is far more than the campaign has paid any other vendor, according to campaign finance reports, representing about an eighth of the $34 million the campaign has spent in total.
De Becker insists he wants to work himself out of a job by getting the Secret Service to do it instead. But he has called on Kennedy supporters to donate to the campaign in order to pay for his company’s protective services in the meantime.
“I would gladly pay for it all myself,” de Becker said of Kennedy’s security costs in a 2023 fundraising video posted by the Kennedy campaign. “He’s my dear friend and I’d like him to win. But it’s not allowed, it would be considered a campaign contribution.”
While de Becker’s dual role as a campaign vendor and prominent super PAC donor doesn’t appear to violate campaign finance laws, it has raised eyebrows among campaign finance watchdogs.
“The arrangement in which Gavin de Becker contributes millions to a pro-RFK Jr. super PAC, and receives most of that money back as a refund, is very unusual,” Saurav Ghosh, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of federal campaign finance reform, told NBC News in a statement.
“De Becker has a financial interest in extending RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign.”
A mutual hatred of Covid lockdowns
Kennedy has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for not granting him Secret Service protection (the decision is up to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in consultation with a bipartisan group of top congressional leaders), baselessly suggesting the president is intentionally endangering his rival.
To help make that case, he tapped de Becker, who has appeared in campaign videos outlining threats Kennedy has received. In September, an armed man was arrested outside a Kennedy fundraiser. A month later, another man was arrested after allegedly trying to break into Kennedy’s Los Angeles home twice.
In a fundraising video posted by the Kennedy campaign, de Becker notes that the Secret Service began protecting presidential candidates after “Bobby’s father was assassinated at a campaign event” in 1968. “What’s happened during the long months that the administration has failed to protect this candidate is super alarming,” de Becker says. “You can help to continue to provide the best level of security that we can accomplish for my dear friend through donating to his campaign.”
De Becker also shares some of Kennedy’s core beliefs, including on vaccines, which experts say are safe.
In interviews, de Becker has displayed intense animosity toward the HPV vaccine, bringing up the vaccine against the sexually transmitted disease in multiple appearances, along with his concerns about the Covid vaccine and deep frustration with pandemic–era policies. Echoing Kennedy, he describes them as the product of big government and big pharmaceutical companies putting groupthink and profit over the truth.
De Becker suffered serious personal loss during the pandemic, which he blames on restrictive lockdowns. As he told podcaster Joe Rogan toward the end of an almost three-hour episode in 2022, de Becker and his family — he has adopted eight children — spent the early months of the pandemic on his compound in Fiji. One of his sons was diagnosed with leukemia, he said, but travel restrictions prevented them from seeking care in another country until it was too late. His son died at 31, de Becker said, “because of lockdowns.”
Most anti-vaccine claims have been widely debunked, but they are highly motivating for a subset of Americans who have helped power Kennedy’s campaign — including Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate.
Kennedy was for years the country’s most prominent vaccine skeptic, running the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which serves as a hub for the “anti-vaccine” movement. The group, from which Kennedy is on leave, also promotes dubious claims about the dangers of fluoride in drinking water, 5G cellular service and genetically modified food.
And like Kennedy, de Becker sees the alleged cover-up of the dangers of vaccines as indicative of a wider conspiracy of powerful interests trying to divide the populace to keep them from rising up together and questioning authority.
“This degree of division and divisiveness in America actually serves power structures,” de Becker said in the 2022 Megyn Kelly interview. “It actually serves people in power, because [what] you don’t want in a population is that they all agree.”
