The Only Good Thing About That RFK Jr. Dead-Bear Story

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea.” —Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., explaining why he placed a dead bear cub under a bicycle in Central Park in 2014

Here at Slate, we’re used to unpacking political absurdities, and 2024 has provided absolutely no shortage of wildly meme-able and just plain mystifying moments. And yet, it isn’t often that a single political figure makes headlines for two (seemingly?) unrelated but equally odd dead-animal incidents in a single summer.

Yes, we are talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It came out this week that he left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park in 2014, and positioned the animal to appear as if it were the victim of a bike collision. (Missed his last dead-animal incident? It surfaced in a Vanity Fair exposé from last month that included a photo of RFK Jr. with a barbecued dog.)

In an attempt to get ahead of a New Yorker profile on him that included the story of the bear carcass, RFK Jr. took to social media to share a jokey retelling of the incident this past weekend. The story does not come across as very fun or funny.

Speaking to actress and comedian Roseanne Barr, and sitting at a kitchen table laden with ribs and barbecue sides, Kennedy states in the three-minute video, posted to X, that in 2014, he came across a dead bear cub on the road—hit and killed by another driver—near Goshen, New York. “I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because 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. And you can do that in New York state,” Kennedy tells Barr. “I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car,” he adds, as the camera zooms in with deranged comedic timing. “Because that would have been bad.”

Well, the bear remained in Kennedy’s van for at least a whole day—according to this telling—as he spent many hours hawking and “catching a lot of game,” then driving to New York City for dinner at Peter Luger Steak House. Then, for some reason, after the dinner, Kennedy realized that he had to “go to the airport,” so he … went to Central Park with some people “who were drinking” (Kennedy clarifies that he himself wasn’t drinking) and they arranged the dead bear with “an old bike” from Kennedy’s car that someone had asked him “to get rid of.” The party made it look like a cyclist had hit a bear and killed her. “We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says in the video, as Barr strains to make various facial expressions showing how amusing she finds it.

It’s a horrible story and does not, in any way, humanize Kennedy to the point of making this remotely normal. It also doesn’t fully track. (He had to get to a New York City airport but found time to drive from Peter Luger’s in Williamsburg to Central Park on the way?) After Kennedy and friends planted the bear, a woman discovered the carcass while walking her dog in the park, prompting an NYPD investigation. The story received widespread news coverage; the New York Times reported on the large number of unanswered questions, which lingered even after the state conservation department revealed the bear’s cause of death: impact from a motor vehicle. “How did the bear end up in Central Park?” wrote then–staff reporter Tatiana Schlossberg in October 2014. “Was there foul play involved?”

Of the bear, Schlossberg wrote: “Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?”

Schlossberg, we should mention here, is Kennedy’s cousin once removed, which adds an even eerier aura to the story. (“Like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story,” she told the Times.) While Schlossberg was reporting on this grotesque (and very anti-bike, might we add) Central Park “prank,” she was completely unaware at the time that the perpetrator was a member of her own family. “The next day, it was on every television station,” Kennedy says while laughing in the video. “There were 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it.”

Setting aside how weird and messed up it is to hold on to a bear carcass for a day in a hot car and then dump it in any city park, perhaps the most horrifying element of the story is Kennedy’s lack of remorse (or awareness) about wasting taxpayer dollars and valuable city resources—helicopters? 20 cop cars?— on a completely mystifying stunt that only a privileged blue blood would think to call “redneck,” as Kennedy does in the video.

The New Yorker profile didn’t even end up including that much about the bear, although it had plenty of other damning details about Kennedy’s life. It did include, however, a photo of Kennedy posing with his hand inside the mouth of the dead bear with blood around its teeth and with an open wound. (“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he told the magazine.)

Kennedy is unlikely to face serious repercussions for the bizarre act in Central Park, given that it occurred nearly a decade ago and the statute of limitations in New York state has since expired (if it hadn’t, he would have been hit with a small fine). So for now, the incident only adds to Kennedy’s reputation as an extraordinarily odd politician and public figure who has built his 2024 campaign from a poisonous cocktail of conspiracy theories, dangerous misinformation, and spooky stunts.

The only upshot, of course, was the memes: The whole story seems to widen the scope of possibility for other long-buried RFK Jr. “pranks” and misdeeds—what else has he been hiding?—prompting internet denizens to joke about what other high-profile crimes Kennedy might confess to by video. Some of our favorites include:

Ha ha! Ha … ha. At least we have jokes. But seriously, folks, how is this guy still in the race for president of the United States?