RFK Jr. is accused of beheading a whale with a chainsaw and taking it home – investigation ongoing

Kennedy said at a rally that the National Marine Fisheries Service recently contacted him about the incident. At a recent event in Glendale, Arizona, he said the investigation into him amounted to “an instrumentalization of our government against political opponents.”

“I received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute saying I was under investigation for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago,” Kennedy told the crowd, The Mirror reported.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees fisheries agencies, said in its response: “It is NOAA's long-standing practice not to comment on open investigations.”

The allegations first surfaced in 2012. Kennedy's daughter Kathleen Kennedy told a magazine at the time that when she was a child, her father had dismembered a dead whale with a chainsaw. Her father cut off the whale's head, tied it to the roof of the family car and drove it home.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would run into the windows of the car and it was the most disgusting thing in the world,” said Kathleen. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with holes cut in them for our mouths and people on the highway would give us the middle finger, but that was just normal everyday life for us.”

“If he had a spark of integrity left, he would give up this whale skull”

Whales have been protected in the United States since 1972 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Kennedy's beheading of the whale was reportedly taken up by a nonprofit organization, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund. The group eventually contacted authorities.

“RFK Jr.'s decapitation of a dead whale was both bizarre and illegal, and any serious environmental lawyer would know better,” wrote Brett Hartl, the group's national policy director.

Hartl added, “Kennedy may think the rules don't apply to him because of his name and privileges, but if he had an ounce of integrity left, he would turn over this whale skull and all other illegally collected wildlife parts to the authorities. If he doesn't, NOAA law enforcement should launch an investigation and possibly bring charges against him.”

Over the weekend, Kennedy said that when he learned of the investigation into him, he wrote a letter to NOAA accusing them of killing wildlife with “huge offshore wind farms off the East Coast.” This year, Kennedy also admitted to dumping the body of a dead bear in New York's Central Park several years ago.