Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been linked to numerous bizarre headlines — including an admission that he once had a worm in his brain — but things just got a lot weirder.
A Vanity Fair article on Tuesday contained an allegation that the independent presidential candidate once ate a barbecued dog.
The article featured a picture that Kennedy — an environmental lawyer —had sent to a friend in 2010, which showed him holding a crisp carcass of an animal, posing with an unidentified woman.
Vanity Fair had a veterinarian examine the picture, and the vet told the outlet it was likely a canine carcass based on the number of ribs seen in the photo.
The outlet also added that Kennedy had told his friend, who was traveling in Asia, that he might like a restaurant that had dogs on the menu.
Responding to Vanity Fair’s allegations, Kennedy said in a “Breaking Points” political podcast on Tuesday that the article was “a lot of garbage.”
Kennedy said: “The picture that they said is of me eating a dog, it’s actually me eating a goat in Patagonia on a whitewater trip many years ago on the Futaleufu River.”
He said that the vet who identified the carcass as a dog was “just not true.”
In a separate Tuesday rant on X, Kennedy said that the carcass was that of a goat, not a dog.
Hey @VanityFair, you know when your veterinary experts call a goat a dog, and your forensic experts say a photo taken in Patagonia was taken in Korea, that you’ve joined the ranks of supermarket tabloids. Keep telling America that up is down if you want. I’ll keep talking about… pic.twitter.com/SGX3QpoaRZ
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 2, 2024
The Vanity Fair article also contained allegations from 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 his family home and touched her hips and breasts, Cooney told Vanity Fair.
Responding to those accusations on the podcast, he said that he was “not a church boy” and that he had a “very, very rambunctious youth.”
Kennedy added that he has “many skeletons in my closet,” and “that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”
He said he would not comment on details from “30-year-old” stories that Vanity Fair was recycling.
But before the dog, came the worm.
Kennedy said during a 2012 deposition that a worm had eaten up part of his brain — a decade-old factoid 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 that doctors had found a dark spot in his brain. While some said it was a tumor, one doctor had told him it “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” he said at the time. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”
Kennedy has also promoted public health conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine misinformation.
Vanity Fair’s deeply unflattering report comes as the presidential election edges ever closer. As an independent candidate, Kennedy is running as an alternative to Biden, who some Democrats fear might be getting too old for the job, and Trump, a convicted felon.
Representatives for Kennedy didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
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