RFK Jr. is being investigated by NOAA officials for chainsawing the head off a dead whale. Photos: Instagram//Unsplash
There’s a hell of a lot of weird news these days, isn’t there? It can be tough to tell what’s real and what’s not, and one story in particular is so strange it didn’t seem real until it was confirmed. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Monday it is investigating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to find out whether he really did decapitate a dead whale 20 years ago.
RFK Jr., who recently dropped his name from the presidential race but is still angling for a role in a Trump White House should there be one, explained at a campaign event that he’d received a letter from the NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Services informing him of the investigation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed to reporters that it was true, but declined to comment anything further.
“It is long standing NOAA practice not to comment on open investigations,” the spokesperson said to CNN.
The bizarre story hit the news after a Town & Country interview from 2012 was recirculated on social media. In it, Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen told her interviewer that her father used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a dead whale he came across in Hyannis Point, Massachusetts. He then allegedly drove the head back to New York, presumably to be put on display.
“[He] ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York,” she said in the interview. “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. 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.”
When the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund caught wind of the decades-old interview, they called on authorities to look into the matter. They wrote a letter to NOAA that claimed Kennedy had “violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and possibly the Endangered Species Act, by illegally cutting the head off of a dead whale in or around 1994 in Hyannis Point, Massachusetts, and bringing it to his New York house.”
Kennedy told rally attendees that the investigation was simply political in nature. “This is all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents,” he said before telling viewers that he had written a response to NOAA accusing the organization of killing marine wildlife with “giant offshore wind farms off the East Coast.”
Federal law prohibits anyone from collecting parts of a protected marine animal if there are still soft tissues attached to it.
In another odd animal story, Kennedy admitted in August he had planted a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014 to make it look as though it had been hit by a bike. He’d picked up the dead cub in upstate New York after it’d been hit by a car.
