It’s safe to assume that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unfamiliar with the concept of new car smell.
Carole Radziwill — whose late husband Anthony was best friends with RFK Jr.’s cousin, the late John F. Kennedy Jr. — admitted on the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast that although the politics of the Secretary of Health and Human Services have changed over the years, there’s always been one constant in his life: his love for roadkill.
And thanks to Kennedy’s macabre hobby, riding in his car sounds a lot like a scene from a horror movie called something like, “Minivan of a Thousand Corpses.”
“He had that weird thing about roadkill, always,” Radziwill said on Swisher’s podcast. “He would pick it up from the road all the time and leave it in his minivan, and sometimes he’d forget. There’d be like a skunk under the seat. His minivan always smelled of death.”
The “Real Housewives of New York City” alum added that she knew Kennedy and his late wife, Mary Richardson, “well” and “spent a lot of time” with them before and after her husband died in 1999.
Radziwill told Swisher that aside from Kennedy’s affinity for animal cadavers, she doesn’t really recognize the man she knew, who she described as once being a “fierce environmental advocate.”
“I just can’t reconcile who it is I thought I knew with this person who has appeared on the scene,” Radziwill said of Kennedy. “He’s undermining everything that the Kennedy family stood for, everything on every level.”
Radziwill, who is also a former ABC journalist, suggested that she’s terrified that the health secretary’s penchant for roadkill, peddling of conspiracy theories and his inability to do his job well or take any accountability for his mistakes will eventually dominate the Kennedy family’s legacy.
“If millions of children die, certainly,” Swisher responded, likely referring to the ongoing measles outbreak, which the New York Times reports has “sickened thousands and caused more than a dozen deaths.”
The resurgence of measles — which the Times notes is a virus that was declared eliminated in 2000 — can be tied to anti-vaccine beliefs that Kennedy helped popularize.
Radziwill told Swisher that she lost touch with Kennedy shortly after Richardson died in 2012. She also implied that she cut him off around the time Kennedy became the face of the anti-vax movement.
“He really made his mark being an antivaxer, that was his whole thing,” Radziwill said. “My feeling is like, he had exhausted everything he could possibly write and talk about on the environment, which I think always was his true passion — at least when I knew him.”
Radziwill went on to say that she thinks Kennedy’s switch from environmentalism to anti-vax peddling was purely a “money thing.”
“So … now you’re going to write 10 books on pharmaceutical companies and vaccines,” Radziwill said. “To my head, it’s like a business move.”
“A grift,” Swisher said.
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“A grift, yeah,” Radziwill agreed.
Then Radziwill summed up why she thinks President Donald Trump picked Kennedy for his cabinet position.
“Grifters see grifters,” Radziwill said.
