RFK JR.’S DIARY SECRETS

How Taking Raccoon’s Penis Is Just the Start of RFK Jr.’s Crazy: Author

Compulsive behavior, inner demons, and new roadkill horror stories have been laid bare in a biography on RFK Jr.

The author behind a new biography on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has revealed jaw-dropping accounts of his rampant philandering, his lifelong tussle with his father’s shadow, and how he once mutilated a dead raccoon on the roadside.

Author Isabel Vincent has ignited buzz with the newly published RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, in which she draws on Kennedy’s secret diaries to piece together a raw portrait of the 72-year-old health secretary.

Vincent told host Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast Podcast that she obtained the diaries from a “trusted source” who knew Mary Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy’s second wife. The diaries had been kept “hostage” by Richardson amid her messy divorce from Kennedy before she took her own life in 2012, Vincent said.

In the diaries, Kennedy, then a jet-setting environmental lawyer, details his struggle to stay faithful to Richardson, once patting himself on the back for making it through a trip without giving in to temptation, according to Vincent’s biography.

“I made it through a difficult week without acting out,” he wrote during a trip to the Hamptons in the summer of 1999, according to Vincent. “I am proud of myself because the Sirens were on every rock out there.”

Vincent told Coles that for Kennedy, who was addicted to heroin for 14 years beginning as a teenager, his serial infidelity was another of his “addictions” he tried to quit, though not one he fully owned up to.

“Certainly it’s something that he’s tried to live with and stop. I mean, he talks about it in his diaries, but he doesn’t take responsibility for it, which drove me crazy,” Vincent said. “When I was reading them, he talks about it being the fault of the women. Women were ‘mugging’ him. That was his term for seduction. You know, he was this helpless victim.”

At the same time, he “gaslit” Richardson and “told her that she was crazy and that her accusations about other women were fantasies,” a source told Vincent, an investigative reporter for the New York Post.

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In a particularly disturbing diary entry, Kennedy detailed slicing off the penis of a roadkill raccoon in front of his children, according to Vincent.

“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,” Vincent said, noting that Kennedy had wanted to be a veterinarian as a child.

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“What do you think he did with the raccoon penis?” 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 said.

She said she was therefore not surprised when Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, admitted to dumping the body of a bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014, or when his daughter Kathleen Kennedy recounted her father cutting off the head of a whale that had been washed ashore and driving the bloody cadaver home, strapped to the roof of their minivan.

Coles remarked that one of the “most interesting things in the diaries” is that they show Kennedy trying to come to terms with his “own burden of legacy.”

Vincent noted that Kennedy calls his father, the senator and Democratic presidential candidate who was assassinated when Kennedy was 14, “daddy” in the diaries.

“When he does that, there’s an element of like, oh my God, since he was 14, he’s had this weight of this legacy on him. And he feels that he has failed his father,” Vinctent said. “He talks about how his dad would have been completely disappointed with him,” she added.

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The author suggested that internal struggle sheds light on why Kennedy ran for president in 2024, a decision that did ultimately lead him to the White House, albeit as a Cabinet member under President Donald Trump.

The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services for comment.

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Erkki ForsterNight News Reporter

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