While Robert Kennedy Jr.‘s bizarre run for office has ended following the suspension of his 2024 presidential campaign, his growing list of poor life choices has not.
RFK Jr. — who has made headlines for endorsing Republican candidate Donald Trump, admitting he was the guy who dumped the body of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, and recounting doctors once found a dead worm in his brain — is back in the news cycle thanks to a resurfaced 2012 Town & Country interview where his daughter Kick Kennedy revealed he had chainsawed a dead whale’s head off he found in Hyannis Port, bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan, and brought it 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 told the magazine at the time. “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.”
Turns out, that the former independent presidential candidate may have violated a federal law.
On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund called on government officials to investigate whether RFK Jr. violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. In a letter to the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Brett Hartl, the national political director of the center, wrote that under both acts, it is “illegal to possess any part of an animal, dead or alive, that is protected under either statute. Continued possession of any whale skull represents a significant and ongoing violation of the law.”
Quoting Kick’s story to Town & Country, Hartl said that while normally an “unverified anecdote” wouldn’t be sufficient evidence as the basis for a probe, RFK Jr. has “admitted that he has recklessly — and with no regard to legal requirements — taken other species of wildlife for his own personal benefit.” He added that his “apparent transport of the marine mammal skull” across state lines from Massachusetts to New York also “represented a felony violation of the Lacey Act, one of the earliest wildlife conservation laws enacted by United States in 1900.”
The letter concludes by emphasizing the group hopes that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement is “able to ensure that Mr. Kennedy surrenders any and all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts beach in 1994” and “consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well.”