RFK Jr., the man running as an alternative to Trump and Biden, just denied he barbecued and ate a dog

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is fending off claims that he once ate a barbecued dog.

• Responding to allegations in a Vanity Fair article, he said that the carcass was that of a goat.

• The independent presidential candidate is running as an alternative to Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been linked to numerous bizarre headlines — including that a doctor once told him he had a worm in his brain — but things just got a lot weirder.

A Vanity Fair article published Tuesday contained an allegation that the independent presidential candidate once ate a barbecued dog.

The article featured a picture that Kennedy — an environmental lawyer —had sent to a friend in 2010, which showed him holding a crisp carcass of an animal and posing with an unidentified woman.

Vanity Fair had a veterinarian examine the picture, and the vet told the outlet it was likely a canine carcass based on the number of ribs seen in the photo.

The outlet added that Kennedy had told his friend who was traveling in Asia that he might like a restaurant that had dogs on the menu.

Responding to the Vanity Fair article, Kennedy said Tuesday on an episode of "Breaking Points," a political podcast, that the article was "a lot of garbage."

Kennedy said: "The picture that they said is of me eating a dog — it's actually me eating a goat in Patagonia on a white-water trip many years ago on the Futaleufú River."

He added that the vet's assessment that the carcass was a dog was "just not true."

In an X post on Tuesday, Kennedy also said that the carcass was that of a goat, not a dog.

The Vanity Fair article also contained allegations from Eliza Cooney, who said she worked for Kennedy as a babysitter in 1998, when she was 23. Cooney told Vanity Fair that on one occasion, Kennedy groped her in the kitchen of his family home and touched her hips and breasts.

Responding to those accusations on the podcast, he said that he was "not a church boy" and that he had a "very, very rambunctious youth."

Kennedy added that he had "many skeletons in my closet" and "that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world."

He said he would not comment on details from "30-year-old" stories that Vanity Fair was recycling.

But before the dog, came the worm.

Kennedy said during a 2012 deposition that a worm had eaten up part of his brain — a decade-old factoid that The New York Times resurfaced this year. The deposition was part of his divorce proceedings with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy.

He said that doctors had found a dark spot in his brain. While some said it was a tumor, he said one doctor told him it "was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died."

"I have cognitive problems, clearly," he said at the time. "I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me."

Kennedy has also promoted public-health conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine misinformation.

Vanity Fair's deeply unflattering report comes as the presidential election edges ever closer. As an independent candidate, Kennedy is running as an alternative to President Joe Biden, who some Democrats fear might be getting too old for the job, and former President Donald Trump, a felon.

Representatives for Kennedy didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

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