Fox News’ Jesse Watters cheekily alluded to a wild report about one of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s animal antics this week while in conversation with Kennedy himself.
Kennedy appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime” Monday to discuss President Donald Trump’s executive order to promote advances in regenerative farming as well as the return of the Presidential Fitness Test.
Watters, however, concluded his chat with Kennedy by asking him if he’ll “leave the raccoons alone” ― an inquiry that likely seemed out of left field for many viewers.
The Fox host’s question was a nod to the HHS secretary’s alleged 2001 encounter with roadkill.
According to the biography “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise,” Kennedy once severed the penis off a dead raccoon he’d discovered at the side of the road, with plans to further study the animal’s genitals.
“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote in a diary entry, according to author Isabel Vincent. “My kids waited patiently in the car.”
Speaking to The Independent, Vincent offered an explanation for Kennedy’s eyebrow-raising move.
“You have to understand, Bobby wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid. His after-school job was at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.,” she told the outlet in April. “So he’s got a great love and interest in animals and a freezer full of roadkill, I’m sure, where he studies it.”
Despite the many headlines that Vincent’s book has generated, Kennedy has neither confirmed nor denied the story. In April, TMZ asked Kennedy directly what he did with the raccoon’s penis and where the, um, alleged specimen ended up, to which he simply chuckled and kept walking.
For now, it appears the HHS secretary is keeping mum. In his Fox appearance Monday, he assured Watters that all raccoons were safe “for the moment.”