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In an unexpected turn of events, the Bennifer breakup has led to the discovery of what appears to be another bizarre story of Robert F. Kennedy Jr and a dead animal.
Following a tabloid report that Kennedy's daughter Kathleen Alexandra "Kick" Kennedy has been spotted spending time with actor Ben Affleck amid his divorce from Jennifer Lopez, it appears the internet collectively Googled the under-the-radar member of the Kennedy clan over the weekend.
What they found was a 2012 profile of the 36-year-old in Town & Country in which she shared an anecdote about her father which the writer characterized as an example of his "eccentric environmentalism."
The story goes that sometime in the mid-1990s, a six-year-old Kick joined her dad as he retrieved the head of a dead whale from a beach near the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.
Kennedy — who on Friday suspended his long-shot presidential campaign and threw his support behind Donald Trump — decapitated the whale with a chainsaw, Kick said.
He then secured its head to the roof of the family minivan with bungee cords, Kick added.
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What Kennedy apparently intended to do with the whale's head was not specified, but the article did note he "likes to study animal skulls and skeletons."
Per Kick's retelling, the family came into a bit of a problem once they got on the road for the five-hour drive back to their home in New York.
"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," Kick said.
She recalled that to deal with the leaking whale juice, "we all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out."
"People on the highway were giving us the finger," she added.
"But that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us," Kick, named after her great-aunt Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy Cavendish, said of her childhood.
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A representative for Kennedy did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been linked to numerous bizarre headlines.
Earlier this month, the 70-year-old came clean about taking a dead bear cub from the road and planting it in Central Park in 2014, which led to local news coverage.
Ahead of his involvement in the bear story being reported, Kennedy told comedian Roseanne Barr in a video posted X that he intended to skin the animal and store the meat in his fridge. However, at the encouragement of his friends he went ahead with the prank instead.
Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker… pic.twitter.com/G13taEGzba
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 4, 2024
He left the dead bear on top of a bike at the side of the road. Per The New Yorker, "a person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist."
A photo of Kennedy pretending to grimace with his hand in the dead eight-month-old bear cub's bloody mouth was shared by the publication and instantly went viral.
Per the state report detailing the necropsy the Department of Environmental Conservation performed on the bear cub, obtained by BI, Kennedy may have been touching the bear's leaked brain tissue.
Kennedy joked that sticking his hand in the bear's mouth could have been how he got his brain worm.
However, he testified about the parasite in his cranium in a deposition two years before the bear was killed, according to The New York Times.
Days after the bear story came out, Kennedy told reporters that the bear wasn't the only dead animal he'd taken from the road.
"I've been picking up roadkill my whole life," Kennedy told reporters, per NBC. "I have a freezer full of it. A thousand cubic-foot freezer."
A spokesperson clarified to the Associated Press that the freezer was only 21 cubic feet.
