While Robert Kennedy Jr.'s bizarre run for president has ended after he suspended his 2024 campaign, his growing list of poor life choices has not.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who made headlines for endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, admitting he was the man who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, and revealing that doctors once found a dead worm in his brain — is back in the news cycle thanks to a resurfaced 2012 case. City and Country In an interview, his daughter, Keck Kennedy, revealed that he cut off the head of a dead whale found in Hyannis Port, tied it with a bungee cord to the roof of the family's minivan, and took it back to Mount Kisco, New York.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would come out the windows, and it was the most annoying thing on earth,” Keck told the magazine. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with holes for mouths, and people on the highway would point fingers at us, but it was just a normal part of our daily lives.”
It turns out the former independent presidential candidate may have committed a federal crime.
On Monday, the Center for Biodiversity Action Fund called on government officials to investigate whether Robert Kennedy Jr. violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Brett Hartle, the center’s national policy director, wrote that under both laws, “it is illegal to possess any part of an animal, dead or alive, that is protected under either law. Continued possession of any whale skull would constitute a significant and ongoing violation of the law.”
While an “unconfirmed tale” is not usually sufficient evidence to serve as a basis for an investigation, Robert Kennedy Jr. “admitted that he recklessly—and without regard to legal requirements—took other wildlife for his own personal gain,” Hartle said, citing Keck’s story in Town & Country. He added that his “apparent transport of the marine mammal skull” across state lines from Massachusetts to New York “also constitutes a criminal violation of the Lacey Act, one of the oldest wildlife conservation laws in the United States, passed in 1900.”
The letter concluded by emphasizing the group's hopes that NOAA's Office of Enforcement would be able to “ensure that Mr. Kennedy turns over any and all illegally acquired wildlife that he still possesses, including the whale skull he took from a Massachusetts beach in 1994” and “consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well.”
