- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denies claims he once ate a barbecued dog.
- In response to allegations in a Vanity Fair article, he said the carcass was that of a goat.
- The independent presidential candidate presents himself as an alternative to Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been linked to plenty of bizarre headlines — including an admission that he once had a brain worm — but things just got a lot stranger.
A Vanity Fair article published Tuesday contained an allegation that the independent presidential candidate once ate a barbecued dog.
The article featured a photo that Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, sent to a friend in 2010, showing him holding a crispy animal carcass and posing with an unidentified woman.
Vanity Fair asked a veterinarian to examine the photo, and he told the outlet that it was likely a dog carcass, given the number of ribs visible in the photo.
The outlet also added that Kennedy told his friend, who was traveling in Asia, that he might like a restaurant that offered dogs on the menu.
Responding to Vanity Fair’s allegations, Kennedy said Tuesday on a political podcast, “Breaking Points,” that the article was “a bunch of garbage.”
Kennedy said: “The picture they said was of me eating a dog was actually me eating a goat in Patagonia on a whitewater trip many years ago on the Futaleufu River.”
He said the vet who identified the carcass as a dog was “simply not right”.
In another post on X on Tuesday, Kennedy said the carcass was that of a goat, not a dog.
The Vanity Fair article also contained allegations of Eliza Cooney, who said she worked for Kennedy as a babysitter in 1998, when she was 23. On one occasion, Kennedy groped her in the kitchen of her family home and touched her hips and breasts, Cooney told Vanity Fair.
In response to these accusations on the podcast, he said he was “not a church kid” and had a “very, very turbulent youth.”
Kennedy added that he had “a lot of skeletons in his closet” and that “if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”
He said he would not comment on details of “30-year-old” stories that Vanity Fair was recycling.
But before the dog came the worm.
In a 2012 deposition, Kennedy said a worm had eaten part of his brain, a decade-old fact that The New York Times resurfaced this year. The deposition was part of his divorce proceedings with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy.
He said doctors found a dark spot on his brain. While some said it was a tumor, one doctor told him it was “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate part of it before it died.”
“I have cognitive issues, that’s for sure,” he said at the time. “I have short-term memory loss and long-term memory loss that affect me.”
Kennedy also promoted public health conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine misinformation.
Vanity Fair’s unflattering report comes as the presidential election approaches. As an independent, Kennedy is running as an alternative to Biden, who some Democrats fear is getting too old for the job, and Trump, a convicted felon.
Representatives for Kennedy did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment sent outside of normal business hours.
