New Yorker Posts a Photo of RFK Jr. With the Dead Bear Cub Before He Ditched It In Central Park

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The new profile in The New Yorker of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was filled with wild stories about his past drug abuse and personal life, but one story stood out: the revelation that Kennedy ditched a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014.

In case it was too weird to believe, Clare Malone’s lengthy piece included a photo of Kennedy posing with the dead bear, which does not do anything to dispel any of the weirdness. The New Yorker editor Michael Luo also posted it on Twitter/X , where it made the social media rounds on Monday:

The story got local news coverage when it happened, but that was when no one knew who would leave a dead black bear cub in such a high-traffic area:

To add another exquisite layer to the story, the reporter who covered the abandoned bear for The New York Times was Tatiana Schlossberg — Kennedy’s own cousin and the daughter of Caroline Kennedy Scholssberg. She told her former employer that she “had no idea” her own family was involved in the story.

Kennedy posted a video from his own social media account to provide his account of the story (and with Roseanne Barr looking on), seemingly mocking The New Yorker with the caption: “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one”:

The New Yorker stayed pretty true to Kennedy’s version:

One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)

After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to [ Cheryl Hines ], got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times . “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times , which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”

Drugs, falconry, Kennedys, dead baby bears, imaginary “errant cyclists,” Roseanne Barr … this story has everything ,