Robert F Kennedy Jr, the third-party candidate for US president, said a health problem he experienced in 2010 “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”, the New York Times reported.
The startling words were contained in a divorce case deposition from 2012 the Times said it obtained.
Two years before the deposition, the paper said, Kennedy experienced “memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumour”.
Neurologists who treated Kennedy’s uncle, the Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, before his death aged 77 from brain cancer in 2009, told the younger man he had a dark spot on his brain scans, and concluded he too had a tumour.
But, Kennedy reportedly said, a doctor at New York-Presbyterian hospital posited another explanation: a parasite in Kennedy’s brain.
Speaking this winter, the paper said, Kennedy told the Times that at around the same time he learned of the parasite in his brain he was also found to have mercury poisoning, which can cause neurological problems, probably due to eating a lot of fish.
In the 2012 deposition, Kennedy reportedly said: “I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”
In his recent interview, the Times said, Kennedy said he had recovered from such problems. The paper also said Kennedy’s spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, responded to a question about whether the…
