Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is accused of once severing the penis of a roadkill raccoon for later study, according to a new biography of the Trump administration official.
Kennedy spotted the animal while driving on the highway with his family, according to a story described in RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, by New York Post journalist Isabel Vincent, which relies on a series of alleged Kennedy diaries Vincent obtained.
“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,” Kennedy wrote in a 2001 entry, according to the book.
“My kids waited patiently in the car,” the entry adds.
Kennedy took the raccoon’s organs to “study them later,” Vincent told People.
“You have to understand, Bobby wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid. His after-school job was at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.,” Vincent said. “So he’s got a great love and interest in animals and a freezer full of roadkill, I’m sure, where he studies it.”
The Independent has contacted HHS for comment.
The allegation joins the long list of strange encounters involving Kennedy and animals.
In 2024, Kennedy admitted to leaving a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade earlier and making it look like the animal had been hit by a bike.
Kennedy said in a video posted on social media that he was driving in the state’s Hudson Valley and saw a different driver hit and kill the animal.
“I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he said in the clip. “It was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
“I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life,” he told reporters in 2024. “I have a freezer full of it.”
Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the health official’s daughter, told Town & Country magazine in 2012 that RFK Jr. once used a chainsaw to decapitate a whale carcass that washed ashore near the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and strapped the head to the family car for a five-hour drive.
“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 told the magazine.
“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.”
In a letter urging the Senate not to confirm RFK Jr., Kennedy’s cousin Caroline Kennedy claimed that he blended chicks and mice in a college dorm room to feed them to a pet falcon.
RFK Jr., a prominent environmentalist and anti-vaxxer before taking office, has said he follows a carnivore diet, eating mostly meat and fermented foods.
During Kennedy’s tenure, HHS has been accused of anti-vaccine messaging, pressuring top scientists, and making scientifically unsupported claims linking painkillers to rising autism diagnoses.
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