Anti-vaccine activist turned independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has revealed that a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.
According to The New York Times, Mr Kennedy made the bizarre admission during a deposition held as part of his 2012 divorce proceeding.
He reportedly said he’d begun to experience “cognitive problems” and both short and long-term memory loss in 2010, not long after his uncle, the late Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, died from the effects of brain cancer.
The Times said the record of his 2012 deposition showed Mr Kennedy had initially feared he, too, had a brain tumour.
But he received a second opinion from a doctor in New York who told him the cause of his problems — and a dark spot on his brain scans — was a dead parasite.
Mr Kennedy testified that the doctor had told him that the dark spot on the scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
He also said in his 2012 deposition that he has suffered from mercury poisoning that has caused neurological issues.
“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.”