“Why?” actress Cheryl Hines can be heard saying in the background of a video her husband, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted to X Tuesday.
It feels like the theme music from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (the Larry David comedy that revels in life’s most awkward moments) should play over the footage of Kennedy wrangling two black snakes. As they writhe in his hands, Hines pleads with him to drop them.
Kennedy joked in the caption of the post that Hines “cheerleads” his efforts to remove the snakes from Dr. Mehmet Oz’s patio. Oz is the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the administration of President Donald Trump. People magazine identified the home where the snake incident occurred as a property in Palm Beach, Fla.
According to Kennedy, the snakes were black racers, described by the University of Georgia’s Savannah Rover Ecology Laboratory as slender, fast moving snakes that are widespread across the southern U.S. They are not venomous, per the Florida Museum.
Cheryl cheerleads the removal of a pair of Black Racers from Dr Oz's patio. pic.twitter.com/A0iiRzOeIF
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) May 26, 2026
In addition to Hines’ voice, Oz’s can be heard in the background of the video too.
“They’re having sex,” Oz said, referring to the snakes. Mating season for black racers is in the spring, the Savannah Rover Ecology Lab noted.
This is not the first time that Kennedy has made headlines for a weird animal story. There’s the tale he told comedian Roseanne Barr of taking a bear carcass from upstate New York and dumping it in Central Park. Then, there’s the time his daughter, Kick Kennedy, revealed that her father once cut the head off a dead whale and fastened it on the roof of the family minivan for a five-hour drive.
“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,” said Kick.
A close up of a Southern Black Racer coiled up on dirt road in Florida.Getty ImagesIn the biography “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise”, journalist Isabel Vincent included a reference to a 2001 entry from Kennedy’s private journal describing pulling over to cut the genitals off of a dead raccoon while his kids waited in the car. While he was running for president in 2024, Kennedy also told reporters that he’s “been picking up roadkill” his whole life.
After reading “The Once and Future King” – a retelling of the legend of King Arthur by T.H. White – at a young age, Kennedy became "obsessed” with falconry, he said in a YouTube video. That’s the practice of hunting using a trained bird of prey.
“To me, it’s like a spiritual experience,” he said.
Kennedy’s cousin Caroline Kennedy has alleged that he would enjoy “showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks,” as USA Today reported.
Kennedy, who was an environmental lawyer before Trump tapped him to run the HHS, has claimed that a worm ate part of his brain and that he was diagnosed with mercury poisoning that he said was linked with consumption of tuna and perch. He’s also reportedly swam with his grandkids in a stream linked with E. coli contamination, hunted dinosaur bones with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and admitted to snorting cocaine off of toilet seats.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy has been controversial in part due to his vaccine skepticism, including criticism of his handling of measles outbreaks. He’s also been criticized by experts for linking use of Tylenol to autism, his touting of the ketogenic diet as a “cure” for schizophrenia and, of course, working out in jeans. Oz is also a controversial figure in the medical community.
