RFK Jr.’s Daughter Said He Once Beheaded a Whale with a Chainsaw. A Ben Affleck Dating Rumor Unearthed the Story
Bobby Kennedy's daughter, Kick, told 'Town & Country' in 2012 about a shocking incident involving her father and a beached whale
Another dead animal story involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. resurfaced over the weekend, following an unusual series of events stemming from Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's divorce news.
In the aftermath of Affleck and Lopez's split, rumors began spreading that Affleck was beginning to date Bobby's 36-year-old daughter, Kick Kennedy. (One PEOPLE source says Affleck and Kick are "hanging out," while another says, "I don't think they even know each other. There's definitely nothing going on.")
In the absence of concrete answers, internet users began hunting for more information on Kick — soon they had dug up and circulated an unrelated 2012 interview with Town & Country where Kick tells a gruesome story of her father beheading a whale.
In the old interview, Kick discussed her memories from the Kennedys' Hyannis Port home, telling the publication about a time when her father, now 70, heard that a dead whale had washed up on the shores of Massachusetts' Squaw Island.
Bobby, who has a passion for studying animal skulls and bones, rushed over to the beach with a chainsaw, and Kick said that when he arrived, he cut the whale's head off and used a bungee cord to tie it to the top of their minivan. He then drove the family five hours to Mount Kisco, N.Y., with the whale fastened on the roof.
The car ride back to New York wasn't a pleasant journey for Kick, who was 6 years old at the time.
"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 recalled in the interview. "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."
The Town & Country story got unearthed weeks after Bobby admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014 to stage it as a bicycle accident.
The politician said in an Aug. 4 video that a decade ago, he saw a bear get hit and killed by a car in front of him during a falconing trip in upstate New York. He loaded the dead bear into his vehicle, and was planning to take it home so he could put the meat in his refrigerator. However, he didn't have time to stop at home between the hawking trip and a scheduled dinner in New York City.
Bobby decided to ditch the roadkill and stage it as a bike accident in Central Park, thinking it would go unquestioned. But the mysterious incident became a national news story, with Tatiana Schlossberg (John F. Kennedy's granddaughter) even reporting on the dead cub for The New York Times.
“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike … Luckily, the story died down after a while," he concluded.
Related: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 10 Siblings: All About His Brothers and Sisters
The dating rumors surrounding Kick and Affleck began around the same time that Bobby abandoned his independent presidential bid and threw his support behind Republican nominee Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Bobby, an anti-vaccine activist, left the Democratic Party in 2023 to become an independent.
In a statement following Bobby's endorsement of Trump on Aug. 23, five of his siblings denounced his swing to the right. "Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear," the statement read. "It is a sad ending to a sad story."
In the same 2012 interview where Kick told the story of her father beheading a beached whale, she joked that her parents would only ever turn their backs on her if she were to become a Republican.
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