Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is best known for his famous family name, his anti-vaccine activism, and his unexpected third-party run for president. He’s not particularly well known for his passion for criminal justice reform. And yet, next month, he’s scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Detroit stop on the New Dawn for Justice Criminal Reform Tour. The six-city tour’s website promises it “amplifies the collective voice calling for equitable and humane reform” and encourages “individuals from all walks of life to contribute to the reshaping of our justice system.”
The tour’s lead organizer is a Kennedy campaign staffer named Angela Stanton King, who brings her own experience to this fight for change. As her bio explains, “With a personal narrative of overcoming incarceration and championing prison reform, she has become a pivotal figure in advocating for justice.”
Here’s what her bio doesn’t say: Stanton King, who is 47, vociferously supported Donald Trump—until she was hired by RFK Jr.’s campaign as its Black outreach director, where she now works. On culture war issues, she has little in common with Kennedy: Stanton King has several times been the subject of media attention for her anti-gay and anti-trans activism, issues Kennedy doesn’t touch. A staunch opponent of abortion, she is the founder of Auntie Angie’s House, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center and home for pregnant women and new mothers, while Kennedy has been generally pro-choice. But despite all that, Stanton King may be promising Kennedy something he desperately needs: an inroad with Black conservatives who are increasingly supporting Donald Trump—about 17 percent, according to a January poll.
The idea that a member of America’s most famous Democratic family could lure Trump voters in this tight race may appear counterintuitive: Until recently, it was a foregone conclusion that Kennedy’s candidacy could only help Trump. Yet Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusading has curried favor with some on the right—and with Black conservatives, Kennedy may see an opportunity.
And if he can appeal to those voters, Kennedy could potentially peel off Black conservatives from both parties, Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie told me. Gillespie, who studies politics in the Black community, noted that unlike white conservatives, Black conservatives sometimes still vote Democrat. Stanton King, said Gillespie, “could possibly attempt to make the claim that her conservative cachet could possibly pick off Republicans, and could possibly pick off some Democratic voters,” some of whom might have soured on Biden because of his support for Israel. Whether Stanton King will be able to deliver, though, is another question. “I think she’s completely full of it,” Gillespie said, “and (Kennedy) should be able to see right through it.”
After a childhood spent bouncing back and forth between Buffalo, New York, and the South, when she was a young adult, Angela Stanton settled in Atlanta—where she became involved in a car-theft racketeering scheme. She was convicted in 2004 and went on to serve two years in state prison. About a decade later, Stanton self-published a memoir called Lies of a Real Housewife: Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil, and alleged that Phaedra Parks, star of the reality TV series Real Housewives of Atlanta, had been part of the same criminal scheme for which Stanton had been convicted. (Parks later sued Stanton for defamation, though she eventually agreed to drop the lawsuit with prejudice.)
During that tumultuous time in her life, Stanton met Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an outspoken Trump supporter and prominent figure in Atlanta’s Black conservative community. “She looked at me as a child, a child that needed to be born again,” Stanton wrote in her 2018 memoir, Life of a Real Housewife: The Angela Stanton Story. King, she wrote, brought her in to help at the crisis pregnancy center and home for new mothers that she was running at the time. The work, which included formerly incarcerated women, was particularly meaningful to Stanton because she had been chained to a bed in prison while giving birth to one of her daughters. King became her mentor and godmother, and Angela Stanton went on to change her name to Angela Stanton King.
In 2020, President Trump officially pardoned Stanton King, saying in a statement that she “works tirelessly to improve reentry outcomes for people returning to their communities upon release from prison, focusing on the critical role of families in the process. This pardon is supported by Alveda King.”
Later that year, Stanton King used the momentum from Trump’s pardon to launch a run for the Georgia congressional seat once held by legendary civil rights leader John Lewis who had recently died of pancreatic cancer. Stanton King’s campaign manager was Trevian Kutti, who had once served as the publicist for Kanye West and would later go on to be charged with Donald Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. In an interview about her campaign with the Guardian, Stanton King denied allegations that she was an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory. When the reporter confronted her with a tweet she had made referencing the debunked QAnon rumor that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking children, she responded, “You know they are. You saw it. You watched the news just like I did.”
Stanton King lost in a landslide to her Democratic opponent, Nikema Williams. But just a month later, as the Covid vaccines were about to be rolled out, Stanton King discovered a new cause. In December 2020, she made an appearance at an Atlanta conference hosted by America’s Frontline Doctors, the right-wing physicians’ group that promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic. The presenters—who included the group’s founder, January 6 insurrectionist Simone Gold—warned the crowd that the US government was using the Black community as guinea pigs for the vaccine. This was an especially potent accusation given the long and troubled relationship between the Black community and the mainstream medical establishment.
Stanton King saw an opportunity and in 2022, with her organization, the American King Foundation, she announced a new initiative called Stop Medical Apartheid to oppose “the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans.” In a press release, Stanton King wrote, “Medical Apartheid is Population Control. Population Control comes in different forms; Vaccines, Abortions, Mass Incarceration, and Perverted Sexual Agendas targeting children. Population Control is Racist! From the WOMB to the TOMB, it’s time Y’all!”
That same year, Stanton King spoke at the Defeat the Mandates rally in Los Angeles, an anti-vaccine event sponsored by a group of activists who also organized the anti-vaccine trucker convo. The lineup also included representatives from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization, Children’s Health Defense. In a sprawling speech, Stanton King thundered against vaccine mandates—but also touched on abortion (“lynching Black babies in the womb”) and transgender rights. “I’m only 45 years young, and I’ve only naturally birthed and naturally raised five children, and I say ‘naturally’ because I raised my boys to be boys and my girls to be girls,” she told the crowd, to thunderous applause.
Stanton King elaborated on that statement in a 2022 appearance on the TV talk show Dr. Phil, telling the in-studio audience that she would never accept her trans daughter’s gender identity. “I believe that it may be a form of mental illness,” she said “It’s not just that he was born male—he is a male.” Dr. Phil pushed back—and afterward, on Instagram, she posted a video of herself ranting about the show and trans people. “If you were supposed to be a woman, you wouldn’t have to go and have surgeries to get titties put on your breasts, you would already be born with them,” she yelled. “If you were a woman, you wouldn’t be born with a dick, you wouldn’t have to go get your dick cut off.” (Kennedy’s campaign didn’t respond to an emailed question about his response to these comments and his stance on transgender rights, or to any of the other questions I sent. Stanton King didn’t respond to my questions, either.)
Throughout her anti-vaccine and anti-trans crusading, Stanton King continued to support Trump in media appearances. “Trump can’t be President forever and I know that,” she tweeted in 2021. “But he’s the only one bold enough to fight these evil Demonic Satanic forces from the pits of HELL and I’m standing with him.”
But in late 2023, her alliances shifted. In a Twitter spaces event in late April, she said she had soured on the Trump campaign after the former president’s team declined to visit and support Auntie Angie’s House. So she reached out to Kennedy, whom she had met at the Defeat the Mandates rally in 2022, through her “really good friend,” Capitol insurrectionist Simone Gold. “He came by, and he sat down, and he talked to us for about an hour and a half,” she recalled. “And when he left that day, his perspective on abortion had changed.”
A few months later, when Kennedy asked her to work for his campaign, she was conflicted. “I did not want my relationship with Trump to be ruined,” she said in the Twitter Spaces event. Yet she had repeatedly reached out to the Trump campaign asking for a job, to no avail. “People were telling me to remember where I came from and I was nothing until Trump gave me a party and it was making it seem like because I got a pardon for Trump that you know, I wasn’t valid enough to have a paid position.” So she accepted Kennedy’s offer. By January of this year, Stanton King was knocking on doors with Kennedy in Atlanta’s historically Black West End neighborhood.
Kennedy, meanwhile, has confirmed that Stanton King’s thinking on abortion has influenced his own. While he has consistently stated that he believes that women should be able to choose abortion at any point in their pregnancies, in a recent appearance on the conservative talk show The Daily Wire, he told the story of his visit to Auntie Angie’s House. “I talked to some mothers in the last couple of weeks in Atlanta, Georgia, in this facility where I’ve been repeatedly back to—Angie’s House, run by Angela Stanton King, who is kind of a relative of Martin Luther King’s family,” he said. “She takes care of women who are being pressured to have abortions because they don’t have the money to take care of the baby, and I don’t think that that should ever be a reason in this country for a woman not carrying her child.”
Stanton King still seems conflicted about the former president. In the Twitter Spaces event, she said she blames her frustrations on “his gatekeepers,” not Trump himself. “I actually still support President Trump,” she said. “I just don’t work for him.” In April, in a since-deleted tweet, she attacked Diante Johnson, a Trump supporter and leader of the Black Conservative Federation, calling him “an open flaming Feminine closet Gay.” In another recent tweet she thundered, “Republicans think I’m helping RFK to help Trump. I have no regrets, but there’s no way on God’s green earth I’d support a party that turned their backs on Black Women & Babies while facing a Black Maternal Health Crisis. Who has their head that far up Trump’s ass cause it AINT me.”
This weekend, Stanton King’s New Dawn for Justice Tour is scheduled to make a stop at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. In an email to Mother Jones, a spokesperson for the King Center, the King family legacy nonprofit that runs the museum at the site, clarified that it “is not in any way affiliated with this event”—it will take place entirely outside in the area that is public space.
Will Stanton King’s imprimatur on the Kennedy campaign be enough to draw Black voters? Emory’s Gillespie doesn’t think so. She pointed to Stanton King’s failed run for Congress in 2020, when her Democratic opponent, Nikema Williams, won with 85 percent of the vote. “I think there may be a question of how deep her networks are—like, how influential could she possibly be in some of these communities?” Which, she said, made her wonder about Kennedy’s discernment. “What does this say about your judgment to put the administration together?”
Stanton King says she has big plans for the Kennedy administration. In her Twitter Spaces event in April, she spoke of “a vision that God gave me” in which there is “an Auntie Angie’s House in every Black community that has Planned Parenthood.” She said she was working with Kennedy on a policy, called More Choice, More Life, to make this vision a reality. “I’m so thankful that Bobby and his team are shedding light on what we’re doing.”
