RFK Jr’s wildest campaign moments – from brain worms to barbecue dogs

The decision by Robert F Kennedy Jr to suspend his presidential campaign brings to an end one of the most bizarre campaigns of recent times.

Kennedy, who introduced the general public to the concept of “leaky brain” and the idea that chemicals in water were making children transgender, initially ran for the Democratic nomination but launched an independent campaign in October 2023.

Related: Robert F Kennedy Jr drops out of US presidential race and endorses Trump

His efforts failed to gain traction but left the public with some unusual, and some unsavory, memories.

The bear cub

In early August, Kennedy had a problem. The New Yorker magazine had got hold of a story about his exploits with a dead bear cub 10 years earlier. Kennedy decided to get ahead of the New Yorker’s scoop, and tell the story himself in a video posted on Twitter.

And what a story it was. It emerged that Kennedy had found a dead bear cub on the side of the road, loaded it in the back of his car, taken a photo with the corpse, left to do some falconing, had a steak dinner, then staged the decomposing bear’s death to look like a bicycle hit-and-run incident in a local park before heading to the airport.

The sexual assault allegations

Eliza Cooney, who worked for Kennedy and his then wife as a live-in nanny at the family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York, told Vanity Fair in July that Kennedy sexually assaulted her at the home in 1998. Cooney alleged that Kennedy touched her leg at a business meeting and later appeared shirtless in her bedroom before asking her to rub lotion on his back.

A few months later, Kennedy “began groping” Cooney in the kitchen, Vanity Fair reported. Kennedy’s response was hardly an apology. Asked about the sexual assault allegation, Kennedy described the Vanity Fair article as “a lot of garbage”, before adding: “I am not a church boy.” Kennedy later said that he had texted Cooney to apologize.

The brain worm

It emerged in April that Kennedy believed part of his brain had been eaten by a worm . The New York Times reported that Kennedy had made the claim during a deposition for his divorce in 2012. In the deposition Kennedy told lawyers: “I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”

Kennedy underwent brain scans of his head and subsequently discovered that the health issue “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.

The dog

Another animal-related controversy. In July, Vanity Fair reported that in 2023 Kennedy sent a photograph of him “with the barbecued remains of what he suggested to the friend was a dog”. The picture showed an animal carcass, which had apparently been cooked on a spit. Kennedy said the carcass in the picture was a goat.

The friend who received the text told Vanity Fair that Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul, so he was certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat. In any case, it’s grotesque.”

The dubious claims

In 2023, while still running as a Democrat, Kennedy appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast . There, Kennedy announced that wifi radiation caused something called “leaky brain” , which in turn causes cancer. Politifact spoke to scientific experts who disagreed, one of whom said there was no “clear evidence” for Kennedy’s claims.

Another claim from Kennedy, in June 2023 , that chemicals in drinking water were causing children to become transgender, appears to come from a study which showed certain chemicals could cause some male frogs to become female. CNN’s KFile spoke to an expert who pointed out that sex in frogs is based on environmental factors, including temperature, whereas the sex of humans is not.