Jimmy Kimmel was baffled by the news that Robert F. Kennedy once cut off a dead raccoon’s penis in front of his children.
Author Isabel Vincent’s new biography, RFK JR.: The Fall and Rise, drew from Kennedy’s diary entries to reveal that the now-Secretary of Health and Human Services once sliced off a roadkill raccoon’s penis to “study it later.”
In a conversation with host Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast Podcast, Vincent speculated that Kennedy “froze” the raccoon penis as he did with other roadkill he regularly found:
“He froze a lot of the roadkill that he would find and then study it,” Vincent said. “I mean, it was amazing to me in the diaries, the catalog of fish that he would catch, and he would annotate it by type, by weight, by length.”
Kennedy’s most famous roadkill catch was the bear carcass he dumped in Central Park in 2014. Kennedy told the story to a bewildered Roseanne Barr in August 2024, posting the video of their conversation to X.
Kimmel jokingly defended Kennedy’s actions in his monologue Thursday.
“I don’t know, I grew up in the ’80s,” Kimmel said. “Whose dad didn’t pull over to carve out a raccoon penis and study it later? I think that was the original ending to Zootopia.”
Kimmel clarified that the raccoon story wasn’t just a rumor, but something taken directly from Kennedy’s diary. Kimmel even quoted the exact passage where Kennedy described the incident:
“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,” Kimmel read.
The late-night host responded, “He thinks his family turned out weird? This is like if Jeffrey Dahmer said, ‘Ew, gross, dad. What are you eating?’”
“I remember a time in this country when we ended Dan Quayle’s career because he misspelled the word ‘potato,’” Kimmel said. “Now we have this: this guy, telling us what to put in our bodies, can’t drive past a festering animal without beheading its boner and throwing it in the back seat with his kids.”
A TMZ reporter confronted Kennedy in the Capital Building on Thursday, asking him, “Secretary, what did you do with the raccoon’s dead penis?”
Kennedy’s security escorted him away from the reporter before he could answer the question.
Kimmel showed the clip in his monologue and responded, bemused, “Has TMZ always been allowed to wander the halls of the Capitol building asking about animal penises?”
