Whale, whale, whale, looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has got a pattern.
Kick Kennedy, the daughter of RFK Jr., regaled Town & Country with a tale of a whale in a 2012 cover story that has resurfaced amid rumors of a potential romance with recently divorced Ben Affleck.
In the interview, which covered a range of topics from her travels and budding acting career to her family legacy, Kennedy, 36, shared an anecdote about a childhood trip to Hyannis Port, Mass., where her father’s at-times-bizarre fascination with dead animals was on full display through a gruesome story of him beheading a whale.
Kick recalled that the day began when her dad, 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 to the beach with a chainsaw. When he arrived, he cut off the whale’s head 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’s head fastened to the roof.
The car ride back to New York was, unsurprisingly, far from pleasant 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.”
This story comes on the heels of the recent dropout from the presidential race admitting to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014, staging it as a bicycle accident—a tale he recounted to Roseanne Barr in an effort to get ahead of an unflattering New Yorker article.
The politician said in an Aug. 4 video that a decade ago, he saw a cub get hit and killed by a car during a falconing trip in upstate New York.
“So I pulled over and picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear. It was in very good condition, and I planned to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he said.
However, he claimed he didn’t have time to stop at home between the hawking trip, a dinner that ran late, and one last destination at the airport.
So, while at Peter Luger Steak House with friends, they thought it would be a “good idea” to dump the dead bear in the park and “make it look like it got hit by a bike.”
“So we went and did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something.”