Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter shared a whale of a tale more than a decade ago, but it went viral for the first time over the weekend, thanks to an unlikely confluence of two factors: Kennedy ending his presidential campaign, and his daughter reportedly choosing to strike up a budding connection with Hollywood’s most divorced man.
Profiled by Town & Country for the magazine’s Christmas 2012 issue, Kick Kennedy shared a bizarre anecdote about what the writer characterized as her father’s “extreme environmentalism.”
Kick Kennedy on June 6, 2018 in Arlington, Virginia.
Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for RFK Human RightsAround 2004, Kennedy caught wind that a dead whale had washed up on a beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and rushed out to the scene with a chainsaw and 6-year-old Kick in tow. He cut the whale’s head off, secured it to the roof of his minivan with bungee cords, and made the five-hour drive back to the family’s home in New York.
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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 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.”
Kick, named after great-aunt Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy Cavendish, made headlines on Saturday after a source told Page Six she’d recently been spotted palling around Los Angeles with Ben Affleck. “The nature of their relationship remains unclear,” the tabloid noted.
The report set off rabid online speculation, particularly because it was confirmed this week that the 52-year-old Affleck and his second wife Jennifer Lopez had split up earlier this year. (Lopez filed for divorce on Tuesday, citing irreconcilable differences.)
Kick, 36, is an actress who has logged appearances on Gossip Girl, The Newsroom, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, alongside stepmother Cheryl Hines. Kennedy shares Kick and a son, Robert III, with Emily Black, his first wife.
Kennedy and Black wed in 1982, but separated a decade later over an affair Kennedy had with the woman who was to become his second wife, Mary Richardson. Richardson, whom Kennedy divorced in 2010, died by suicide in May 2012, seven months before Town & Country profiled Kick.
On Friday—a day before the Page Six report—Kick’s father suspended his independent presidential campaign, announcing his support for the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump.
“In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path of electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” Kennedy said in a lengthy farewell address to supporters.
That “media control” extended to multiple embarrassing news cycles about his various run-ins with all manner of creatures great and small over the years. First, in May, came a New York Times report about how doctors in 2010 discovered that a parasitic worm had entered his brain and then died. Kennedy quickly confirmed this to be true.
Then, in July, Vanity Fair reported that Kennedy had the previous year texted a friend a photo of him “with the barbecued remains of what he suggested to the friend was a dog.” Kennedy rejected this, saying the dead animal he’d been pictured with had been a goat.
Robert Kennedy Jr. reaches out and pets a whale (not the one featured in Kick Kennedy’s story) in Mexico.
Bob Carey/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesThe hits kept coming, though, and a full month hadn’t gone by before Kennedy went on social media to admit—in an attempt to get ahead of a forthcoming New Yorker story—that he was the guy who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park in an infamous incident more than a decade ago.
“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy said in the video.
And that’s without even getting into the thousand-cubic-foot freezer he keeps stocked full of roadkill meat.
