In a bizarre story shared by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on social media, he explained how he took a dead bear cub and dumped it in Central Park as a prank aimed at getting people to believe a bicycle had hit it and caused the animal’s death. He said that he was sharing the 2014 story because the New Yorker’s fact-checkers called him and indicated they were doing a story on the event.
The three-minute video’s social media caption reads, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker…” It’s unclear what there would be to spin about the story that the independent presidential candidate tells, but watch the New Yorker for more.
Sitting at a kitchen table, he laid the story out for actress and comedian Roseanne Barr, who he was hanging out with for some reason.
“I was taking a group of people falconing up in Goshen, New York, up in the Hudson Valley, and I was supposed to meet them there at like maybe 8 or 9,” Kennedy began. “I was driving up maybe, you know, really early, like 7, and then a woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. A young bear.”
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear,” Kennedy said. “And it was very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York state — you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
The politician and activist continued his strange tale, adding, “And so then we went hawking and I had the bear in my car. And then we had a really good day, and we went late. We were catching a lot of game, and the people really loved it, so we stayed late. And instead of going back to my home in Westchester, I had to go right to the city, because there was a dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House.”
“And at the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn’t go home — I had to go to the airport.” That’s when he had a realization: “And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car, because, well, that would have been bad.”
Barr agrees at this point. Kennedy clearly had the good sense to not leave a dead bear in his car for a prolonged period of time while he traveled.
“So then I thought, you know, at that time — this was the little bit of the redneck in me. There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York, they had just put in the bike lanes,” Kennedy ominously continued .”And some people, a couple of people had gotten killed, and it was every day, and people had been badly injured. Every day, it was in the press.”
“And so I thought — I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he continued. Kennedy has long been sober after overcoming a 14-year heroin addiction when he was young, but apparently still thought it was a great idea to take advice from people drinking around him. “And I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of, and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in the Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike’ — it would be fun, funny for people.”
“So everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea,’ so we went and did that,” Kennedy said, continuing his description of the kind of idea that people think is genius while they’re drunk. “And we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”
“The next day, it was like, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper,” Kennedy added. Oops. “And I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying over it and I was like, oh my God. What did I do?”
“And then there were some people on TV in tie-back suits with gloves on, lifting up the bike, and they were saying they were going to take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted.”
A smiling Barr added, “uh oh” and chuckled as he continued.
“And I was worried, because my prints were all over that bike,” Kennedy said. He did not say whether or not he ever came forward to authorities, but the implication was that he did not.
“And luckily the story died down after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade,” Kennedy added. “And the New Yorker somehow found out about it and they’re going to do a big article on me, and that’s one of the articles. So they asked me, the fact-checkers… and, you know, it’s going to be a bad story.”
It was unclear from his tone if he meant that the story would be bad journalistically, bad for Kennedy or something else.
The clip concludes as Barr delivers another “uh oh” and laughs again as someone in the background notes, “I think it’s a great story, personally.” The video then closes with an iris out film effect, narrowing down like the end of a “Looney Tunes” cartoon. Which feels vaguely appropriate for the grim yet cartoonish story.
He was correct that it was widely covered when it happened, including on CNN. You can watch the network’s anchors noting that authorities had figured out that someone had brought the dead bear and left it there, as there had been no bears in the park “for a long, long time. It seems as if someone brought the thing there, which is really sad.”
While polling in the low double digits behind former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, Kennedy’s poll numbers have collapsed since Biden dropped out of the race, with the member of the famed political clan seeming to have little chance of making a significant impact on the 2024 presidential race.
