Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was widely criticized after admitting to MAGA actor Roseanne Barr that in 2014 he found a dead bear cub on the road and then bizarrely placed it in New York City's Central Park to make it look like it had been hit by a bicycle.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Back in October 2014, the story gained media attention with then-New York Times reporter Tatiana Schlossberg—granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy—covering it for the outlet.
Kennedy posted the video to X on Sunday, tagging The New Yorker in the post, apparently a reference to the fact that they were set to include the incident in an upcoming article. In the bizarre video, Kennedy reveals to Roseanne that he and some friends were responsible for dumping the bear cub after finding it dead.
You can hear what he said in the video below.
He recalled:
"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 maybe 8 or 9 [a.m.]. I was driving up 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 I put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear. It was in very good condition and I was gonna 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."
"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 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 ... and at the end of the dinner, I realized I couldn't go home. I had to go to the airport."
"The bear was in my car and I didn't want to leave the bear in my car because then that would have been bad. So then I thought ... this was a little bit of the redneck in me."
Kennedy said there had been a "series of bicycle accidents in New York" at the time so he decided to stage one:
"I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. And I said I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of. I said, 'Let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like it got hit by one."
"Everybody thought, 'That's a great idea!' We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something. The next day it was on every television station, front page of every paper. I turned on the TV and there was a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars. ... I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’" ...
“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike … Luckily, the story died down after a while."
Kennedy said the story "stayed dead for a decade" before it came to the attention of The New Yorker:
"They're going to do a big article on me and that's one of the articles. So they asked me, the fact-checkers. You know it's going to be a bad story."
As expected, The New Yorker did publish a piece titled "What Does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Actually Want?", which revisited the bear incident.
But it was a little TMI—and people were fairly disgusted by Kennedy's belated confession.
Funnily enough, The New Yorker article notes that Kennedy was asked to comment on a picture showing him putting his fingers inside the bear's mouth, to which he reportedly replied:
“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm."
That's a reference to another weird Kennedy incident, namely his admission in a 2012 deposition that doctors believed a parasite "got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died."
Kennedy reportedly consulted several of the nation's leading neurologists after experiencing significant memory loss and mental fogginess. These symptoms raised alarms in a friend who worried that Kennedy might have a brain tumor.
Shortly afterward, a doctor from New York-Presbyterian Hospital offered an alternative interpretation. Instead of a tumor, this doctor suggested that Kennedy's condition was the result of a dead parasite lodged in his brain.
Around the same time he discovered the parasite, Kennedy also learned he had mercury poisoning, likely from consuming fish with high levels of the toxic heavy metal. Mercury poisoning can lead to severe neurological problems, which Kennedy acknowledged during his deposition.
