A forthcoming book claims Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once cut the penis from a dead raccoon during a family trip.
According to the allegation, the Health and Human Services Secretary came across the roadkill while traveling on a highway with his family, and removed the animal’s penis with the intention of examining it later.
The account appears in RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, which reportedly includes diary entries attributed to Kennedy from 2001 describing the episode.
“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,” he allegedly wrote.
“My kids waited patiently in the car,” the diary entry continues.
Isabel Vincent, a New York Post journalist and the book’s author, said in comments to People magazine that Kennedy took the raccoon’s penis to ‘study them later’.
“You have to understand, Bobby wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid. His after-school job was at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.,” Vincent commented. “So he’s got a great love and interest in animals and a freezer full of roadkill, I’m sure, where he studies it.”
Elsewhere, Kennedy has previously addressed another unusual roadkill-related story. In 2024, he acknowledged that roughly a decade earlier he had picked up a bear cub that had been struck by a vehicle in New York’s Hudson Valley. He said he intended to skin it for meat, but later left it in Central Park — alongside a bicycle — to make it look like the bear had been killed in a collision involving a cyclist.
In a video posted on social media, he said he was driving in the Hudson Valley when he witnessed another driver hit the animal.
“I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he claimed in the clip. “It was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
He has reportedly said he ultimately didn’t follow through on taking the bear home, largely because of scheduling pressures. Vanity Fair reported he needed to make a dinner reservation at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn and then go directly to the airport, leaving no time to stop at his home in Westchester.
“The next day it was, like, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper, and I turned on the TV and there was, like, a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars,” he recounted. “There were helicopters flying over it and I was like, Oh my God, what did I do? And then there was some people on TV and Tyvek suits with gloves on lifting up the bike, and they’re saying they’re gonna take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted. And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”