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International Business Times
International Business Times
Politics
Mary Papenfuss

Whale Decapitation Is Latest Weird Story To Surface About RFK Jr.

Another odd story has surfaced about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last week suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. (Credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/Getty Images)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s decapitation of a whale carcass is the latest strange tale to surface about the former presidential candidate-turned-Donald-Trump-endorser.

It was just "normal day-to-day stuff," his daughter Kick Kennedy said when recounting the incident in a 2012 interview in Town & Country magazine.

She told how her dad — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — raced to a Hyannis Port beach some 30 years ago while on vacation with the family with a chainsaw when he heard about a dead whale there and sliced off the creature's head.

He then lashed it to the roof of the family's van with bungee cords for the five-hour drive back to the family's home in 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 recalled.

"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," she noted.

The whale tale was the latest oddity to surface about Kennedy, who recently told of recovering the body of bear cub killed by another driver in a car accident and dumping it in Manhattan's Central Park after a pal thought it would be "amusing."

He had initially planned to butcher the animal to eat it.

Kennedy also revealed in a 2012 divorce deposition that a worm ate part of his brain before it died and was discovered by doctors, reported the New York Times, which viewed the document.

"I have cognitive problems, clearly," Kennedy said in the deposition. "I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me."

A spoof Washington Post op ed over the weekend pretended to be written by Kennedy's "brain worm," and said that it, like its host, was also endorsing Trump for president, "I guess."

Kennedy's colorful stories will all play into how his Trump endorsement last week will impact the former president's campaign.

While Kennedy, a former harsh critic of Trump, will likely woo many of his followers into the former president's fold, other Trump supporters may be put off by RFK Jr., his stories, and his staunch anti-vaccine positions fueled by conspiracy theories.

Shortly before Kennedy threw his support behind Trump, the former president told Fox News: "If he endorsed me, I would be honored by it. He really has his heart in the right place."

Some polling indicates Trump could benefit as Kennedy backers switch to him.

But David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told USA Today that it will have "very little impact in the national polling."

He added: "The question is, what will the impact be in the swing states? And from what we've seen, it's probably going to be marginal."

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