You know it’s a wild election season when this one doesn’t even break the top 10 of the most bizarre stories to come out, but here we are.
Of course everybody’s focused on the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still running his longshot campaign as an independent. (And I’m calling it a longshot campaign to be nice. He has no chance of actually winning).
And hey, any publicity for your campaign is good publicity, right?
Well not necessarily, because apparently RFK Jr. got wind of a hit piece that was about to come out on him from The New Yorker, and decided to get ahead of the story himself – admitting that he once dumped a dead bear in New York City’s Central Park and staged the scene to look like a bicycle accident.
Wait, what?
Well RFK Jr. told the bizarre story to Roseanne Barr for some reason in a video posted to his Twitter account, and apparently this happened back in 2014. According to the presidential candidate (and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy), he was on a trip to go falconing when the car in front of him hit a young bear.
So instead of leaving the dead bear on the side of the road, RFK decided to pick up the roadkill to take home with him:
“I pick up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear. And it was very good condition. And I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
The presidential candidate points out that it’s legal to get a roadkill tag for bears in New York, which is a sentence that I never thought I’d write but then again, it’s 2024.
Well apparently the falconing trip ran long because they were having so much success, so instead of going home, he had to go straight to a dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House in Brooklyn. And after dinner, RFK didn’t have time to go home to drop off the bear, because he had to be at the airport to catch a flight.
Obviously he didn’t want to leave the dead bear in his car, so RFK says that “the redneck” in him came out, and he began thinking about a recent string of high-profile bicycle accidents in NYC. And he happened to have an old bike in his car, so along with his companions (who RFK admits had been drinking, although he doesn’t drink himself), they decided to put the bear in Central Park and make it look like it had gotten hit by a bike.
Foolproof plan, right?
But the next day, the dead bear in Central Park was all over the news, even attracting coverage from national outlets.
How NYC local news covered the dead bear RFK Jr put into Central Park ten years ago 😬👀 https://t.co/J25gDeLQ1Q pic.twitter.com/nJio51Li3R
— Luther Lowe (@lutherlowe) August 4, 2024
Berman in October of 2014: It seems that someone brought it there which is really sad pic.twitter.com/lxLLoH6OlR
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 4, 2024
That’s when RFK thought he was in trouble:
“The next day, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper. And I turn on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’
And then there were some people on TV in Tyvek suits with gloves on lifting up the bike. They were saying they were going to take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted. And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”
Well the story disappeared for a while, but apparently The New Yorker somehow got wind of it and asked RFK for comment, so he decided to release his own video telling the story to get out ahead of it.
Welcome to 2024, folks. We have presidential candidates admitting to dumping dead bears in Central Park and it’s not even one of the top 10 craziest headlines of the election.
Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker… pic.twitter.com/G13taEGzba
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 4, 2024
And here’s a news report from 2014 about the bizarre discovery:
