Joe Kennedy’s Home Surrounded by a Wall, Proving His Hypocrisy-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
After U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, was critical of President Donald Trump’s border wall and immigration stance, photos supposedly showing a wall around Kennedy’s home surfaced online.
The Truth:
The Palm Beach home shown surrounded by a wall in viral photos once belonged to the Kennedy family. However, the Kennedys sold the home when Joe Kennedy was just a teenager.
The rumor cropped up after Joe Kennedy gave the Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address. After the address, Kennedy was floated as a possible Democratic candidate for president. That put a big target on his back for Democratic critics. Claims about a border wall surrounding Joe Kennedy’s home were an outgrowth of that.
It’s not clear where, exactly, the rumor started. But it was widely repeated and shared on social media. Aerial photos showed a concrete border — or fence — surrounding the Palm Beach home. And comments implied that Kennedy was a hypocrite for living in a house with a wall while also being critical of Trump’s immigration policies and proposal to build a border wall.
The first problem with the claim is that “wall” is designed to keep water — not people — from entering the property. Sea walls are commonly used to protect beachfront homes in Palm Beach from storm surges. The need to protect multi-million properties from raging waters was demonstrated during Hurricane Irma. Otherwise, most home owners would probably prefer not to wall their properties off from the white sand beaches on the side.
The second problem is that the home doesn’t belong to Joe Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, Sr., purchased the estate in 1933. The family used it as a beach house over they years, and John F. Kennedy used it as a “Winter White House” during his presidency. But the family sold the estate in 1995 (when the younger Joe Kennedy was just a teenager). The estate was sold again in 2015 for a record $31 million.
So, claims that Joe Kennedy’s home is surrounded by a wall are “fiction.”