Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014.
The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, shows him with controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago. Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her outside of the city, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat.
It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of an upcoming story in The New Yorker magazine.
The Kennedy campaign and the New Yorker did not respond to requests for comment. Seated with rolled-up sleeves at a table covered with food, Mr Kennedy tells Ms Barr in the video that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed. He says he pulled over to put the bear in his vehicle.
“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,” he says. “And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
New York state does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law stipulates that a person has to notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to acquire such a tag. Mr Kennedy does not appear to have done that.
Instead, he says he continued to his falconing venture, which went late into the evening. He says he went on to a dinner reservation he had at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen. “At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn’t go home,” Mr Kennedy says. “I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”
That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.
He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.
“So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says. “The next day… it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?’”
What the ever-living fuck?
Shouldn’t he get charged with obfuscating justice?! How many detective hours did he waste? How much did it cost to lug away?
I don’t think this is the act of a sane and rational human, and I really just feel sorry for the bear.
This was 10 years ago, so statute of limitations has long run out on any charges that might have come from this.
But other than that, agreed.
Is it obstruction of justice if cops are just so dumb and incompetent that they respond to bear roadkill with 20 cars and an helicopter ?
RFK Jr is stranger than fiction
It might be a well-tuned campaign strategy.
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article289366908.html
Donald Trump’s entry into politics marked a shift from traditional political engagement to what can be described as “politainment” — the blending of politics and entertainment. Trump’s background as a reality TV star and his penchant for dramatic, often controversial statements turned political events into spectacles that captured widespread public attention. This shift made politics more accessible and engaging to a broader audience, transforming it into a form of entertainment that people followed with the same fervor as a reality TV show.
Let’s say that Trump has discovered that what a certain chunk of the electorate actually wants is a circus. Okay. You place a larger circus on the table.
I don’t know I’d call it fine tuned given his current polling numbers of 4.2%
That’s way higher than I would’ve guessed tbh
Crazier still was it was like 10% before Biden withdrew.
Wow, what a totally normal display of rational decision making.
Has anyone checked to see if he is just Sacha Baron Cohen in a sophisticated mask?
I know this is exactly the kind of calculated, rational decision making I want from the guy with his finger on the button that ends the world.
Good chance he’s full of shit and what really happened was more criminal so he had too come up with an even more batshit story to get himself out of it
He almost certainly killed the bear himself.
100%, including the “all my friends were drunk but I wasnt”
And wtf is this circus van he’s driving around in with fuckin bears and bicycles and shit.
Maybe he robbed a band of traveling carnies in a cocaine fueled rage because the space lizards told him to.
He emphasises that he had not been drinking.
That’s not the flex he thinks it is. I think it’s much worse to imagine someone completely sober thinking that was going to be a great idea.
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I’m pretty sure admitting to drunk driving is worse. In New York City? The chance of killing someone is way too high.
Not to mention bears
Aldo doesn’t the family have kind of a history with that sort of thing?
What the hell
It’s fucking weird, right ?
So weird. Like one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. And I grew up in a hillbilly part of Appalachia.
I’m in Indiana. We don’t have bears, but we have plenty of dead deer by the side of the road and plenty of rural folk. I have yet to see someone pick one up and put it in their car for later.
From Georgia… is there a non hillbilly part of Appalachia? There might be less hillbilly parts but it’s pretty ubiquitous in my experience
I mean, I live in a part that’s more normal than the place I used to live lol. But my normal could also still be hella hillbilly to someone else lol
Fair wasn’t trying to hate, I just know the region lol, nothing wrong with hillbilly folks as a rule, just some of em are well you know
Just another Monday in the 2024 Presidential Election.
You know what? The story is fucking hilarious and wild, I fuck with it. This is somehow both the most redneck and silver spoon bougie shit I’ve ever seen
While driving for a casual falconing trip (bougie), he finds some fresh roadkill and decides he’s going to stuff it in his car and take it and carve it up for food (redneck).
He goes late, realizes he’s not making it home (both). Has a hilarious thought, also has with the exact random shit in his car to make that reality, acts on it (redneck)
A dead bear found in the middle of NYC with the implication that a bicyclist ran it over is fantastic, holy fuck XD
If you haven’t heard, Trae Crowder & Corey Ryan Forrester, 2 comedians from the WellRed Comedy tour, have a podcast called Puttin On Airs.
They talk specifically about the Venn Diagram that exists for a number a topics, where the overlap between the fancy & trashy experiences of said topics is rather hilarious.
This story will likely be covered soon.
Adam Carolla had a bit like this on Loveline way back. Outdoor showers, multiple multiple old cars, and big family hunting trips were on his list of “rich man, poor man”
(Carolla’s a dick now, but I listened a lot back in the day)
I found the original guardian article from ten years ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/07/black-bear-cub-dead-new-york-central-park-mystery
Oh my God they dusted the bicycle for prints.
This story is nuts in 2024, when we’ve all been immersed in insanity for years.
If a fucking Kennedy had been arrested for faking a bear murder in 2014, the world would have fallen into the fucking sun.
Girl, what?
How did he know “the person who hit and killed the bear” was a woman?
Probably because he helped get it off the road after she hit it. I don’t think he’s being sexist here, I think he quite likely did encounter a woman who had hit a bear. He apparently has a whole thing for roadkill meat, and is more than happy to make it his problem.
The guy is stranger than fiction.
Maybe that’s how he got the brain worm
Almost definitely. Between hunting rats in cow carcass pits, eating strange bushmeat on safaris and a lifelong habit of collecting more roadkill than he has room for, it’s almost certain he’s consumed something parasitic as a result
Yeah, it just seemed weird that he said “I pulled over” and “I put it in the back of my van” if she was there too.
Then again, he does have brain worms so… /Shrug
She was in a different car than him and didn’t help him move it.
You seem to be going out of your way to be confused by some pretty simple sentence structure. That’s not the weird part of the story lmao.
I was more commenting on how even the “normal” part of the story was weird. He didn’t even get a few sentences in before it felt wonky, and went off the rails from there.
E: If this random woman hit the bear, talked to him, let him load it up, and then saw the exact same bear show up in Central Park, wouldn’t she have reported that? If she wasn’t there, how did he know her gender? Neither of those stories make sense to me.
The bear had pink tire marks all over it
I know “weird” is being applied to Trump, but my god this dude is fucking weird.
Brains worms = low intelligence = weird af
Don’t forget the incest… just a bit of incest thrown in really amps that weirdness & gives it a kick.
Booze and coke. Not weird at all.
I’ve never done coke, but I’ve been really drunk and I’ve been around people who are really drunk and really high on coke and this is still a weird as fuck thing to do.
I guess it’s just me then.
You and RFK Jr
RFK is way weirder than Trump, and I don’t say that lightly
The recent Daily Show with John Oliver episode really does a deep dive on just how completely nuts RFK Jr is.
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Do you mean this episode of Last Week Tonight?
Yes, that would be the one.
had to set my VPN to isreal before it’d let me watch it. Not available in the US, Canada, or Germany, but good ol’ apartheid isreal getting all that sweet sweet John Oliver goodness 🙄
Anywhere outside of the blocked areas would have been fine. I think my VPN was set to Japan when I watched it.
I’m in Sweden and can watch it without turning on my VPN.
Any mirrors? Not available in my country.
I can watch it here in Sweden. Do you have a VPN?
This man is just so bizarre
Is RFK a character in an ARG? What is happening on this timeline?
Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her
He definitely hit that bear
There’s no reason to lie about that when he literally admits to dumping a bear in Central Park, and causing a massive police response.
May I remind you about the brain worms?
He also got famous as an environmentalist. I don’t think “killed a bear cub with a car” plays well with that core audience.
OP, your post text wiped out all the paragraph separations:
https://sffa.community/post/105
Lemmy Markdown Formatting Guide
Lemmy cares about the number of newlines between paragraphs. If you want to have a new paragraph, you need to have at least one extra newline between the two paragraphs. Or else, Lemmy will treat it as a single paragraph.
So this:
Type this. And this. Get this.Produces this:
Type this. And this. Get this.
And this:
Type this. And this. Get this.Produces this:
Type this.
And this.
Get this.
Furthermore, you can put three spaces at the end of a line before a break and it’ll treat it as a proper break.
Type this.
And this.
Get this.Wow! Thank you!
No problem! Yeah it’s a very nice feature of Lemmy markup that I am pretty sure Reddit did not have.
i think it was 5 spaces on the r site
Nope, it was 3
It would be great if it didn’t always just the drop the first newline.
Ooh, I didn’t know that one.
TIL!I believe it’s just two spaces.
That seems to have worked.
Thank you, fixed it!
Thank you, looks good!
This guy is my new favourite batshit insane presidential candidate. He’s funnier, and he has zero chance of getting elected.
He’s not got as pure a soul as vermin supreme though. Plus, is he an abolitionist?
Plus, is he an abolitionist?
Slavery, abortion, prison, or guns?
Vaccines lmfao
