Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is laughing off his latest controversy.
The health secretary, 72, kept mum when TMZ confronted him about a bizarre anecdote in his biography that involved cutting off a dead raccoon’s penis in front of his children.
In RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, author Isabel Vincent uncovered a November 2001 diary entry by Kennedy where he detailed one of his many run-ins with animal carcasses.
“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,” he wrote, reportedly in reference to grudges held by his brother Douglas Kennedy and cousin Bobby Shriver. “My kids waited patiently in the car.”
TMZ, which has launched a foray into Washington, D.C., pressed Kennedy on the incident on Thursday.
“Secretary, what did you do with the raccoon’s dead penis? Where is it now?” a reporter asked.
Kennedy simply chuckled at the question as his security swooped in and escorted him away.
Vincent told The Daily Beast Podcast that Kennedy cut off the dead animal’s genitals to study it for later, noting his childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian.
“In his diary, he talks about stopping with his kids. He’s got his kids in a minivan. He stops. He sees a dead raccoon. He stops, leaves the kids in the van, and cuts off the penis of the raccoon in order to study it later,” she said.
“What do you think he did with the raccoon penis?” host Joanna Coles asked.
“I think he froze it, like he froze a lot of the roadkill that he would find and then study it. 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,” Vincent responded.
Kennedy has long drawn controversy for his odd history with dead animals, which resurfaced during his failed bid for the presidency in 2024.
In 2012, Kennedy’s daughter Kick recalled in an interview with Town & Country magazine how her dad once ran down to a Massachusetts beach with a chainsaw after learning that a dead whale had washed ashore. He then cut off the animal’s head and bungee-corded it to the roof of their minivan for the five-hour trip back to New York.
In 2024, Kennedy admitted to finding a bear carcass on the road and bringing it into Central Park as a prank. The incident later made the news.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’” he said in a clip uploaded to X. “Luckily, the story died down after a while and it stayed dead for a decade.”
Kennedy’s cousin Caroline also exposed him for using a disturbing method to feed his hawks.
“He enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks,” she said in a scathing letter to senators on the eve of his confirmation hearings. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
