Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an avid animal genitalia researcher in his spare time, once pulled the family sedan to the side of the road after spying a dead raccoon and swiftly cut off its sex organs so he could “study them later.”
The bizarre account by the nation’s top civilian health official was unearthed in the new book “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise,” authored by The Post’s own Isabel Vincent, who drew upon a wide range of sources including private journals he penned while living in New York City between 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,” reads a surreal passage in which the Health and Human Services head, 72, was reportedly lamenting his rocky relationships with his brother Douglas Kennedy and cousin Bobby Shriver.
The eccentric Kennedy scion has a history of collecting animal parts and carcasses, the most recently revealed a raccoon’s penis. Amy Harris/Shutterstock “My kids waited patiently in the car,” he noted, later telling People magazine he collected the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later.”
The eccentric Kennedy scion’s bizarre recollection adds to the laundry list of grisly encounters with animal parts he’s had over the years.
His daughter, Kick Kennedy, recalled in a 2012 interview with Town & Country magazine that her father’s fascination with animal viscera once put a smelly damper on a childhood family vacation to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
Upon learning a whale carcass had washed ashore on nearby Squaw Island, the elder Kennedy made a beeline for the beach and proceeded to decapitate the beast with a chainsaw.
He then strapped the whale’s enormous noggin to the roof of the family minivan with a bungee cord, intending once again to bring it home to study, grossing out the family in his dogged pursuit of knowledge.
Kennedy spotted the dead raccoon on the side of the road during a family vacation and pulled over to collect its genitals. rsgphoto – stock.adobe.com “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 2024, while briefly running for president, Kennedy admitted to the New Yorker magazine that a decade earlier he had dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park after a botched attempt to skin it.
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In an apparent effort to pre-empt the article’s imminent publication, Kennedy admitted in a video on social media that he and some buddies had been drinking when they hatched the scheme to ditch the cub’s body and “make it look like he got hit by a bike.”
He claimed he found the killed cub while on a falconing trip in Goshen, New York.
Last year, after President Trump nominated Kennedy to lead HHS, his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, claimed in a letter to lawmakers that while in college he put chicks and mice in a blender to feed his hawks, calling his dorm room “a perverse scene of despair and violence,” according to a report in the Telegraph.
So far, the results of Kennedy’s rigorous whale head and raccoon penis studies have not been publicly disclosed.
