What to know about the third-party candidate’s latest viral story.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is back in the news and at the center of another bizarre story. (Parasitic brain worms are only tangentially involved.)
The third-party candidate admitted to leaving a dead bear cub in Central Park about a decade ago as a joke. He shared the story in a video he made with the comedian Roseanne Barr ahead of a New Yorker profile that was published Monday morning.
He posted the clip on social media and commented, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, New Yorker.”
The anecdote was given just two paragraphs in the lengthy feature about the politician’s rise, his famous family, and his heterodox views. The magazine also ran a photo of Kennedy posing with the dead cub in the trunk of his car.
When asked about the incident, Kennedy told the New Yorker: “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worms.” (Earlier this year, RFK Jr. revealed that he had been diagnosed with a parasite that doctors believe ate a portion of his brain.)
In RFK Jr.’s recounting, he was driving in the Hudson Valley when he saw a woman in front of him hit and kill a young bear. He pulled over and loaded the body into his van, planning to skin it and save the meat, Kennedy explains in the video.
He then drove into Brooklyn to have dinner with friends while the carcass was in his trunk. Kennedy said that the dinner ran late, and he had to get to the airport, so he didn’t want to leave the cub in his car. So he decided to leave it in Central Park beside one of his old bicycles to make it look like an accident — as a gag.
Kennedy said that at the time, there’d been several serious bicycle accidents in the park and that his dinner companions all thought the stunt was a “great idea.”
“We thought it’d be amusing for whoever found it,” he said.
The discovery of a black bear in the heart of New York City was, unsurprisingly, extensively covered in the local press. Coincidentally, the New York Times reporter assigned to the story was Tatiana Schlossberg — the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s cousin.
In an election this dramatic, it can be hard for a candidate to seize the news cycle. He may be plummeting in the polls, but Kennedy has, once again, made himself the internet’s main character.
