Ben Affleck probably never expected that media coverage of his dramatic divorce from Jennifer Lopez would lead to another unsavory tale about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. desecrating the corpse of a large animal for his own amusement.
But that’s what happened over the weekend. After Lopez filed for divorce early last week, Affleck’s name popped up in connection with Kick Kennedy, a 36-year-old sometime Hollywood actor, who happens to be the oldest daughter of the polarizing Kennedy. Page Six reported that Affleck and Kick have been “spending time” together amid his divorce from Lopez, turning up together at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel and other hotspots.
While the nature of Affleck and Kick’s relationship remains “unclear,” the fascination with their association is no doubt fueled by the fact that she’s the daughter of the polarizing politician and Kennedy heir.
The one-time environmentalist and Democrat-turned-independent anti-vaccine crusader also has been in the news over the past week, as he suspended his presidential campaign Friday and endorsed Donald Trump. Kennedy’s Trump endorsement prompted immediate denunciation from five of his siblings, who said he has betrayed “the values” that their father and family “hold most dear.”
As expected, Affleck’s connection to Kick Kennedy prompted lots of internet sleuthing, with the sleuths landing on a 2012 Town and Country profile about her. And, in the profile, the writer shared how the then-24-year-old socialite and budding actor and philanthropist recounted one of her father’s acts of “extreme environmentalism.”
In 1994, when Kick was 6 and she was vacationing with her family at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, her father learned that a dead whale had washed up on a nearby beach, Town and Country reported. As part of his environmentalism, Kennedy apparently liked to study animal skulls and skeletons. So he rushed out to the beach with a chainsaw and his young daughter in tow. He cut the whale’s head off, secured it to the roof of his minivan with bungee cords and made the five-hour drive back to the family’s 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 recalled to Town and Country. “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.”
Kick’s story about her father desecrating the whale corpse brings to mind another of one of his recent controversies, which also involved a wild animal. Earlier this month, Kennedy went on social media to admit that he was the person who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014, sparking an infamous incident that prompted an animal cruelty investigation that was never solved, the Daily Beast reported.
Kennedy posted a social media video “to get ahead” of a New Yorker story, which was going expose the bear cub-dumping incident. He explained in a video chat with comedian Roseanne Barr that he was driving through the Hudson Valley to meet friends to go falconing. He came upon the “roadkill” black bear cub and thought it was in “good” enough condition to skin for meat, so he put it in the back of his van and drove around with it for the day. But after realizing he couldn’t get home anytime soon to refrigerate the dead bear, he and his friends decided to leave it in Central Park.
“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy told Barr in the video.
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s daughter has been making news for being connected to one of the most infamous celebrity divorces in a long time. People are naturally trying to learn more about her.
According to her IMDB page, she’s had a sporadic Hollywood career, playing small parts in “Gossip Girl,” “The Newsroom,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” alongside her stepmother Cheryl Hines. She is named for her great aunt Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the independent-minded sister of Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, who married into the British aristocracy but died in a plane crash in 1948.
The current Kick Kennedy is the product of her father’s first marriage to Emily Black, whom he divorced in 1994, the same year as the reported whale decapitation. Kennedy then married his second wife, Mary Richardson, with whom he had four children.
During his marriage to Richardson, Kennedy engaged in multiple affairs and allegedly sexually assaulted the couple’s 23-year-old babysitter, according to a July report in Vanity Fair. Richardson died by suicide in May 2012, around the time that Kennedy began dating Hines and about seven months before Town and Country profiled Kick for its Christmas issue. “It was a rough summer,” Kick said about the months following her stepmother’s suicide.
The Town and Country profile also addressed some Kennedy-related celebrity gossip at the time — how Kick’s younger half-brother Conor, then 18, was dating Taylor Swift, 23.
Given Kick’s reported new association with Affleck, the resurfaced Town and Country profile also brought some curious celebrity connections into alignment. Kick spoke about her closeness to her grandmother, Ethel Kennedy. One of Kick’s favorite stories about her grandmother, then 84, involved the Kennedy matriarch’s fondness for a song by Marc Anthony. He, of course, is the third husband of Jennifer Lopez, who is now divorcing Kick’s new friend Ben Affleck.
“She used to make us listen to his song ‘I Need to Know,'” Kick recalled. “She loved this song so much — it was her jam.”
