RFK Jr.’s ‘Minivan Always Smelled of Death’ From ‘Roadkill,’ Says ‘RHONY’ Alum Carole Radziwill

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been collecting dead animals off the streets his entire life — and even boasted in 2024 that he had a “freezer full” of them. Now, former Kennedy in-law Carole Radziwill is sharing more insight into the politician’s bizarre obsession.

The 71-year-old “had a weird thing about roadkill, always,” the Real Housewives of New York City alum, 62, confirmed on the Tuesday, August 12 episode of On with Kara Swisher podcast.

“He would pick it up from the road all the time and leave it in his minivan and sometimes he’d forget,” Radziwill — who is the widow of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ nephew, Anthony — said. “There’d be, like, a skunk under the seat. His minivan always smelled of death.”

The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services infamously made headlines in 2024 when he confessed in a video posted on X that he had picked up a bear cub who was fatally hit by a car in upstate New York in 2014, with plans to “skin” it and “put the meat in [my] refrigerator.”

Instead of leaving it in the car while he went on a trip, he decided to dump the bear carcass in Central Park, he explained. It was found by a dog walker, sparking a decade-long mystery about how it got there.

In a 2012 interview with Town and Country magazine, RFK Jr.’s daughter, Kathleen, 37, recalled that when she was 6, her dad used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a whale that had washed ashore near the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

RJK Jr. then strapped the whale’s head to the roof of their minivan for the five-hour drive home to Mount Kisco, New York. “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,” she recalled.

“We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger,” she said at the time, “but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”