Warning: Disturbing photo ahead.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may have gotten ahead of his dumped bear cub story this weekend, but he couldn’t erase the photographic evidence from the bizarre event. The New Yorker’s Monday deep dive into the presidential hopeful contains a photo of RFK posing with the carcass in question, shoving his hand into the dead animal’s mouth.
The bear cub carcass, which was discovered in Central Park back in 2014, led to an investigation by the NYPD at the time.
The story first broke on Sunday by Kennedy himself, a day before Clare Malone’s story published. “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker…” the independent candidate posted on X along with a video of him telling the story to comedian Roseanne Barr.
In the video, Kennedy claimed he saw a lady hit a black bear cub with her vehicle around Goshen, N.Y. He then got out of his own car and picked up the bear with the intention of skinning the creature and putting the meat in his refrigerator. But between hawking with some friends and a dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House in New York City, he ran out of time.
“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,” Kennedy says in the video. “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.”
Knowing that there had been a string of fatal bike accidents in the area, Kennedy thought it would be “fun” and “funny” to stage the dead bear to make it look like it had been hit by a bike. In the clip, Kennedy clarified that he wasn’t drinking when he made this decision but that people around him were drinking “who thought this was a good idea.”
“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,” Kennedy explained in the video.
When asked about the incident by Malone, Kennedy said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” a reference to a New York Times report that revealed doctors found a dead worm in the politician’s brain in 2012.
The nephew of the U.S. president John F. Kennedy and senator Ted Kennedy, Kennedy is an independent candidate in the 2024 United States presidential election
