If you keep up with politics and the 2024 presidential race in particular, you’ve probably found yourself regularly asking, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?” and usually in reference to Donald Trump.* But not infrequently, one could also ask that same question about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like when the brain-eating-worm story came out. Or when the photo of him gleefully posing with an animal carcass was published. Or when his response to an allegation of sexual assault made by his kids’ former babysitter involved the words “I am not a church boy.” Or when he told The New York Times he used to live with an emu that regularly attacked his wife. Or when he tried to get ahead of an unflattering New Yorker article by telling Roseanne Barr, on film, about the time he’d planned to eat a dead bear cub but had a flight to catch and so staged an elaborate murder scene in Central Park instead.

Given all of the aforementioned, you might have thought there was nothing else Kennedy could do to elicit a “what the actual fuck” from people. But surprise: He’s still got it!

Thanks to a recently unearthed Town & Country profile of Kennedy’s eldest daughter, Kick Kennedy, that was published in 2012, we now know this:

Kick’s taste for the extreme was fed by her dad’s eccentric environmentalism. Exhibit A: When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby—who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons—ran down to the beach with a chain saw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, 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 recalls. “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.”

Emphasis ours because, as we said, what the actual fuck. Honestly, it’s hard to identify the weirdest detail of this deeply weird story. Was it the part about:

• Kennedy beheading a whale via chain saw?
• The whale juice pouring into the car?
• His kids wearing plastic bags over their heads to avoid said whale juice?
• How, by his daughter’s own admission, this was “normal day-to-day stuff for us,” reinforcing the idea that it truly would not be surprising in the slightest if another Kennedy revealed that Bobby used to play football on the beaches of Hyannis Port using animal skulls?

Incidentally, and unrelated to her father’s wildly creepy interactions with carcasses, Kick Kennedy suggested in the same Town & Country interview that, in her parents’ eyes, by far the worst thing she could ever do in life was “bec[o]me a Republican.” Fast-forward 12 years, though, and her father has endorsed perhaps the worst Republican of all time for president. Makes you think!

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.

*Though sometimes JD Vance.

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