Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. probably won’t win the 2024 presidential race, but when it comes to making weird admissions about past run-ins with animals, the independent candidate continues to set a historic pace. First, there was his brain worm. Then there was the dead dog he posed for a photo with but denied eating. Now there’s the caper of Central Park’s dead black-bear cub.
In case you don’t remember, back in October 2014, New Yorkers were shocked to learn that a woman walking her dog in Central Park had come upon the body of a fatally traumatized six-month-old bear. Per the New York Times at the time:
The furry black mass lay hidden under a bush near Central Park’s main loop, unnoticed, unmoving and partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. A dog rustling in the brush drew the first eyes to the bush and a sight rarely, if ever, found in modern Manhattan: a baby black bear, dead. A call to 911 followed and soon yellow police tape cordoned off the area near West 69th Street as detectives found themselves facing a mysterious crime scene on a sunny Monday morning. How the animal, a three-foot-long female, got to that spot remained a mystery at day’s end: a cub, probably born this year, somehow separated from her mother and from anything resembling a natural habitat. …
The police described the bear as having had trauma to her body, but it was not immediately clear how she had died. … Nearby, New Yorkers increasingly familiar with wildlife sightings — a coyote in the park, a dolphin off Throgs Neck in the Bronx — offered theories of their own. Some suspected foul play. Others guessed an accident with a car. One man confidently pronounced the bear old enough to have wandered over from Morris County, N.J.
A necropsy later determined that the bear had died from “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision,” but no one could have possibly guessed the bizarre sequence of events that had led to the bear lying there.
RFK Jr. has now admitted he staged the whole thing via a video shared on Sunday in which he tells the story to Roseanne Barr. The admission was meant to preempt the reporting of the story in a New Yorker profile which was published one day later.
Here’s what he told Barr he did: While driving off to do some upstate falconing in Goshen, New York, Kennedy saw a woman run over the bear cub. Kennedy stopped his van and collected the fresh roadkill with the intention of skinning and eating it, because “it was in very good condition” and he wanted to put the meat in his fridge. But alas, he didn’t get back home right away, as he went falconing and later had some dinner plans at Peter Luger Steak House down in Brooklyn. Then he had a flight to catch, but still had a dead bear in his van.
So what’s a 60-year-old Kennedy scion to do? He hatched up a “redneck” scheme with his apparently drunk friends to drive to Manhattan and plant the dead bear in Central Park, along with an old bicycle Kennedy also happened to have in his van, in what was supposed to look like the aftermath of a fatal bike-on-bear accident. He thought this would be “amusing.”
He also got worried, he told Barr, when the dead bear was big local news and, amid the subsequent animal-cruelty investigation, it appeared as though the bike would be taken to a lab so it could be fingerprinted. “My prints were all over that bike,” he said.
But Kennedy’s secret remained safe, at least for a time. He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the meddling New Yorker.
“Luckily, the story died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade, and The New Yorker somehow found out about it,” Kennedy told Barr, explaining that the magazine’s fact-checkers had contacted him to confirm the details of his roadkill high jinks. “It’s going to be a bad story,” he said.
On Monday, the New Yorker published its profile of RFK Jr. by Clare Malone, which did indeed include the bear cub incident:
One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist.
They also published a photo of Kennedy posing with the carcass:
Another fun fact: One of the followup stories on the dead bear mystery at the time was written by John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, then Times climate reporter Tatiana Schlossberg. One bear expert Schlossberg spoke with for that report correctly guessed what had happened, at least in part:
Dr. Lana Ciarniello, a bear expert in Canada, said that most bear experts in the United States were attending a conference in Greece and would be hard to reach for comment. She could not make the trip, so she was able to offer her thoughts on the mystery. She guessed that someone killed the bear and took it to Central Park. It was highly unlikely that a bear cub would travel across the concrete jungle.
In a comment to the Times after RFK Jr. acknowledged his responsibility, Schlossberg said, “Like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story.”
On Monday morning, the DSNY put out a timely reminder on how to properly get rid of dead animals:
