Timothy Mellon, a reclusive banking inheritor who was considered one of President Trump’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s greatest monetary backers within the 2024 election, gave two sprawling properties in Connecticut final 12 months to Kids’s Well being Protection, an anti-vaccine group Mr. Kennedy based.
The donation, which has not beforehand been reported, reveals how tightly intertwined Mr. Mellon has turn out to be with Mr. Kennedy and their shared work in opposition to vaccines. The adjoining parcels cowl about 300 acres on the confluence of the Connecticut and Eightmile Rivers in Lyme and have a pool, a tennis courtroom and a number of other buildings, property data present.
The properties had been appraised this 12 months at a complete of $5.5 million. It isn’t clear what Kids’s Well being Protection, which relies in New Jersey, plans to do with them. Mr. Mellon, 83, has talked with delight about constructing the property. In a self-published autobiography in 2014, he wrote about his plans for the land.
“I can’t make such a contribution to teams just like the Nature Conservancy or Sierra Membership as a result of I’ve little confidence that they, in contrast to say the state of Connecticut, shall be round perpetually,” Mr. Mellon wrote.
The property was offered for $0 in August, property data filed with the Lyme city clerk present, and Mr. Mellon agreed to cowl the prices of enhancements and upkeep whereas retaining entry to elements of the property, together with a household cemetery.
In a textual content message to The New York Instances, Mr. Mellon, who cultivates an aura of distance and thriller, stated the donation was none of its enterprise and declined to remark. Kids’s Well being Protection didn’t reply to requests for remark, nor did its president, Mary Holland.
Mr. Kennedy, the secretary of well being and human companies, didn’t reply to a request for remark. He stepped down as chairman of Kids’s Well being Protection in December 2024 earlier than his affirmation hearings, after taking a go away of absence to run for president.
“Know that it has been considered one of my best privileges and honors to guide this group over all these years,” Mr. Kennedy wrote in a resignation letter to Ms. Holland and the group’s board. “I’m assured that the group below your and the board’s management will proceed to do excellent work defending the well being and rights of youngsters.”
Mr. Mellon burst into the world of political fund-raising within the Trump period. Throughout the 2024 cycle, he gave $150 million to Mr. Trump’s tremendous PAC and $25 million to Mr. Kennedy’s tremendous PAC. Final October, throughout the federal government shutdown, Mr. Mellon was reported to be the nameless donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. authorities to pay the salaries of troops.
Kids’s Well being Protection has just lately taken in between $15 million and $23 million a 12 months in income, based on tax filings. Mr. Kennedy joined the group in 2015, when it was known as the World Mercury Venture. In 2018, the group rebranded, and it has aggressively disseminated vaccine misinformation, together with unproven claims that vaccines trigger autism.
Mr. Kennedy’s funds had been intently tied to the group’s: Along with receiving a wage, he was paid by a regulation agency that dealt with work for Kids’s Well being Protection. He has stated he donated the proceeds of e-book gross sales to the group. He and Mr. Mellon share a writer, Skyhorse Publishing, whose founder, Tony Lyons, is on the board of Kids’s Well being Protection.
In a 2024 interview with The Instances, Mr. Kennedy stated Mr. Mellon had been a monetary champion of Kids’s Well being Protection because the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Kennedy stated Mr. Mellon appeared involved much less by vaccines than by authorities lockdowns and private liberties.
Mr. Kennedy stated he had met Mr. Mellon in individual as soon as. It isn’t clear how a lot Mr. Mellon has given to the group.
Within the blurb on the entrance cowl of Mr. Mellon’s autobiography, Mr. Kennedy known as the billionaire a “maverick entrepreneur who embodies probably the most admirable qualities of what F.D.R. known as ‘American Industrial genius.’”
The transaction in Lyme is specified by a collection of deeds on file on the clerk’s workplace.
In August, Mr. Mellon gave the 2 parcels, 100-7 Joshuatown Street and 62 Joshua Lane, to Kids’s Well being Protection, the data present. Days later, Mr. Mellon signed an settlement for Clipper Properties, a restricted legal responsibility firm in Wyoming, the place Mr. Mellon has a house, to take care of the 2 properties for 5 years and canopy the price of insurance coverage.
As a part of this settlement, signed by Mr. Mellon and Ms. Holland, a Clipper consultant would reside in a brick home on one of many properties.
The property data associated to the Kids’s Well being Protection transaction don’t seem to confer with a signature architectural contribution that Mr. Mellon made to Lyme — a precise duplicate of a medieval Norwegian church he had constructed greater than a decade in the past on a nook of considered one of his plots.
Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis
