RFK Jr. posts video of himself handling snakes, wife sounds alarm in bizarre clip: ‘Bobby, please’

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday posted a video clip of himself handling snakes as his Hollywood star wife voiced concern in the background.

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“Cheryl cheerleads the removal of a pair of Black Racers from Dr Oz’s patio,” wrote Kennedy, a scion of the fabled Massachusetts political clan, on his personal X account above the 49-second video.

In the clip, a shoeless Kennedy, clad in a dress shirt, slacks, and his signature skinny tie approaches two snakes at a corner of the patio and picks them up.

“Why? Bobby, why?” his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, can be heard saying in the background, not so much in a cheering tone as one of gentle exasperation.

“Those are dangerous. … You’re nuts,” she adds at one point.

The snakes continuously writhe in Kennedy’s grip and at one point, he quickly moves a hand away, prompting a male voice sounding very much like Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to ask, “are they biting?”

“Yeah,” Kennedy says.

“Honey, honey, let it go,” Hines beseeches her husband. “Oh my God, I can’t watch. Bobby, please. Bobby, please.”

As the snakes become subdued, Kennedy continues holding them aloft and invites his afternoon companions to come closer.

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It’s hardly Kennedy’s first bizarre brush with the animal kingdom.

New Yorkers, for example, won’t soon forget the video clip posted during his presidential campaign in the spring of 2024, in which he said he once retrieved a bear that was killed by a motorist and left the carcass in Central Park with a bicycle on top, sparking a mystery that consumed the city about a decade before.

Kennedy recounted in the video that the bear was in “very good condition” and he was planning to skin it and put the meat in his refrigerator. But he didn’t have time to drop it off at his home in Westchester before dinner in the city, he said. Instead of leaving the bear in the car, he dumped it in the park with the bike, saying it would be “amusing for whoever found it.”

Then there was a murky whale anecdote.

A 2012 interview with Kennedy’s daughter, Kick Kennedy, that appeared in Town & Country magazine resurfaced that detailed “Kick’s taste for the extreme” that “was fed by her dad’s eccentric environmentalism.”

The article described Kick’s recollection of a family trip to Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, when she was six years old. She remembers her dad excitedly rushing down to the beach with a chainsaw to saw off the head of a dead whale that had washed ashore.

She alleged Kennedy bungee-cordedthe headto the roof of the family’s minivan.

Her yarn prompted a probe from the NOAA.

“NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement determined the allegation to be unfounded and has closed the investigation,” a spokesperson for the agency told CNN in October 2024.

In addition, RFK Jr. said a worm entered his brain once.

The New York Times reported in May 2024 Kennedy was mistakenly diagnosed with a brain tumor after scans picked up abnormalities that turned out to be “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times.

Material from prior Globe stories and from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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