Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Saturday he is being investigated over a decades-old story that he decapitated a dead whale and transported its skull across state lines.
Kennedy made the admission during a campaign event for former President Trump, saying he had received a letter last week. The report comes weeks after a left-wing environmental group resurfaced the whale story and called for an investigation.
“I received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute saying that they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago,” Kennedy said Saturday.
“This is all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents,” he added.
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Kennedy did not offer details about the incident, but it first became public thanks to a 2012 interview with Kennedy’s daughter, Kick Kennedy, with Town and Country Magazine.
In the interview, Kick describes her father cutting the head off of a dead whale and strapping it to the roof of their vehicle, before driving from a beach in Massachusetts to Mount Kisco, New York.
The left-wing group, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, had argued the dead animal was protected by the Marine Mammal Protection and Endangered Species, making it illegal to possess any part of it.
They further claimed that it was likely a felony violation of the 1900 Lacey Act, “which prohibits the transportation of any wildlife, dead or alive, that was reduced to possession in violation of any state, federal or international regulation or law.”
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“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, saying the incident happened sometime around 1994.
“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 added.
The Center for Biological Diversity resurfaced the story just days after Kennedy withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Trump.
The whale incident is not the only recent controversy involving Kennedy and dead animals. He also admitted to dumping the body of a dead bear in New York City’s Central Park over a decade ago.
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