On the morning of Oct. 6, 2014, the residents of New York City were puzzled. A six-month-old black bear cub was found dead in Central Park. No wild bears are roaming around Manhattan, and despite investigators’ efforts to determine who dumped the bear in the park, the case quickly went cold.
Nearly ten years later, the culprit has come forward: presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who decided to preempt a magazine piece exposing this strange tale.
On Sunday, Kennedy posted a video of himself speaking to Roseanne Barr, in which he describes seeing a woman hit the cub with her car while he was driving to a falconry in the Hudson Valley. Kennedy captioned the video “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker,” tagging the famed magazine in his post.
In the video, Kennedy describes a bizarre series of events. “I was going to skin the bear — and it was in very good condition — and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” Kennedy tells Barr. He threw the bear in his trunk, had a lovely day hawking, and a late dinner — when Kennedy realized he was running late for a flight.
“I couldn’t go home, I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”
So instead of acting like a normal person and reporting the dead bear to wildlife authorities, or maybe just tossing it in the closest dumpster he could find, or a slew of other less insane courses of action, Kennedy decided to try and stage the cubs death to look like an accident in Central Park.
I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,'” Kennedy tells Barr, who laughs at the anecdote. “We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”
On Monday, The New Yorker ran their story, which not only featured the anecdote but also a photo of Kennedy posing with the dead bear cub in the trunk of his car. The cub has a visible gash near its shoulder, and Kennedy has a finger in the cub’s bloody mouth and is feigning being bitten. When asked by The New Yorker to comment on the incident, Kennedy quipped: “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”
Cub abandonment wasn’t the only bizarre animal anecdote uncovered by The New Yorker. The magazine spoke to former Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, who recounted an incident in which Kennedy visited our magazine’s office “carrying a bucket with a little injured baby bird.”
“So then we have our meeting, and we do our thing, and suddenly he’s, like, ‘I gotta go. Um, can you get one of your interns to take the bird to the vet?’” Dana recalls. While Kennedy claimed that Dana’s story was “a lie,” Rolling Stone Executive Editor Sean Woods backed up Dana’s anecdote. “Fact-check: True,” he said.
Kennedy is running against former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris as an independent, third-party candidate, and he’s carrying enough scandals for all three campaigns.
Last month, Kennedy did not deny a claim that he assaulted a woman who worked as an in-residence babysitter for Kennedy and his ex-wife in 1998. “I’m not a church boy. I am not running like that. I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” he said in response to the allegation, which was reported by Vanity Fair.
That same Vanity Fair report featured a 2010 photo of Kennedy devouring the roasted carcass of what appeared to be a dog. The candidate claimed that the animal had actually been a goat, and added in for good measure that he would never engage in cannibalism — not that anyone asked.
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