Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently the nation’s secretary of health and human services, often positions himself as an enemy of settled science. But when it comes to dead animals, he’s somehow always ready for hands-on exploration. In a new biography, RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise—released Tuesday—journalist Isabel Vincent reports that Kennedy once pulled over to the side of the road to cut off the genitals of a dead racoon for quasi-scientific study.
According to the New York Post, Vincent learned about this incident from Kennedy’s own private journals, which he wrote between the years of 1999 and 2001. “I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” the journal entry read—a surprising show of self-awareness for someone sticking his fingers into a dead woodland creature.
Apparently, Kennedy doesn’t have a love for animals so much as an irrepressible desire to have them around. It apparently started early: In his 2018 memoir, American Values, he described an attack from his pet coatimundi, a type of raccoon (again with the raccoons!), that sent his mother into premature labor. His wish for communion with critters persists whether they are alive or dead—but seems especially strong when they’re no longer breathing.
The raccoon incident wasn’t Kennedy’s first run-in with roadkill, and it wouldn’t be his last. Let’s run through the whole sordid inventory of critters who have had unusual encounters with Kennedy—including denizens of several different animal kingdoms.
Whale of a Tale
Kennedy’s oldest daughter, Kick Kennedy, once told Town & Country that in the 1990s, her father lugged home the head of a whale carcass that had washed up on the beach on Hyannis Port’s Squaw Island. (In 2024 the National Marine Fisheries Service said it was investigating the incident after an environmental group alleged that Kennedy had violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but no charges were ever filed.)
The way Kennedy’s daughter told the story didn’t make it sound like it was a one-off event. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” she said in the 2012 interview. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Cub Reporting
Kennedy’s most recent (documented) roadkill encounter took place in 2014, when he abandoned a dead bear on the side of the road in Central Park. A decade later, he told Roseanne Barr about the supposed series of events that landed him in this strange situation. According to Kennedy, while driving upstate, he saw a woman hit the bear with her car. He put the corpse in his van, went falconing, eventually went to Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn, and then realized he would not have time to bring the bear home before having to catch a flight. So he took a detour through Central Park to dispose of the animal there. Perhaps if you’re Kennedy, this is also normal day-to-day stuff.