It took a decade, but the man who left a dead bear cub in Central Park finally confessed Sunday in a social media post.
Why now? Because he wanted to get ahead of an article in The New Yorker that included the bear's story. The magazine also obtained a photograph of the culprit posing with his fingers in the little creature's bloody mouth, pretending to bite it.
“Maybe that’s where my brain worm came from,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joked to New Yorker writer Clare Malone.
Listen, I get that Democrats have a lot of fun calling former President Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, weirdos — an insult popularized by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is not weird at all and became Kamala Harris’s running mate on Tuesday. But I’m not sure Trump and Vance can outdo Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate who is the embodiment of Hunter S. Thompson’s famous aphorism: “When the going gets weird, the weirdos get professional.”
“Strange” barely begins to describe Kennedy, a dangerous demagogue who shamelessly trades on his last name, associates with far-right figures while posing as a liberal, and lies to Americans about vaccines.
It is no wonder his family has disowned him. Jack Schlossberg, grandson of John F. Kennedy, said on Instagram last month that his cousin's candidacy is “a disgrace.”
“He’s leveraging Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” said Schlossberg, a political editor at Vogue. “I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president… Let’s not get distracted, again, by someone’s vanity project.”
Kennedy seems to make news only when he does something, shall we say, strange.
The New York Times reported in May that Kennedy said doctors had found a In 2010, when he was suffering from mental confusion and memory loss, the man had revealed that information in a deposition taken while seeking his second divorce, from Mary Richardson Kennedy. He stated that a worm “got into his brain, ate part of it, and then died,” which was relevant to the divorce proceedings because he claimed the parasite had diminished his earning capacity.
Around the same time, the Times reported, Kennedy was also suffering from mercury poisoning, which can affect cognition, and atrial fibrillation, which he described in his divorce filing as making him feel like he had “a bag of worms in his chest.”
Another recent report noted that Kennedy posed with the grilled remains of what he eventually claimed was a goat during a trip to South America in 2010, although some veterinarians said the animal appeared to be a dog.
But when you get stories like “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. forced to deny biting a dog’s corpse,” how much do the details really matter?
In June, the New York Times published an article about two wild crows that Kennedy had tamed at his Los Angeles home. The paper reported that the birds had replaced his pet emu, Toby, who regularly attacked his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and was later killed by a mountain lion.
It's nothing strange, amirite?
But back to the bear. In the video Kennedy posted, he tells the story to Roseanne Barr, who received about 70,000 votes when she ran for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 2012. It's not clear why Barr was in the video, but my theory is that it was a meeting of the Oddball Presidential Candidates Club.
As Barr listens, Kennedy recounts the story: On his way to a falconry excursion in upstate New York, he saw the bear cub hit by a van. He picked up the carcass, intending to skin it and store the meat in the refrigerator later. But he was late for dinner at the Peter Luger Steak House in New York City, so he didn’t have time to stop by his home in Westchester County. Then dinner was delayed and he needed to get to the airport, so he hatched a plan: “I said, ‘We’re going to put the bear in Central Park and make it look like it got hit by a bicycle. It would be fun for people,’” Kennedy said. He also explained, “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but there were people drinking with me who thought it was a good idea.”
According to him, picking up roadkill and dumping them in Central Park as a joke may have been “a bit of the redneck in me.” Kennedy is a redneck, just as Donald Trump Jr. is a regular blue collar worker. No, that was the behavior of an angry, entitled scion of a rich and famous American clan.
However, many headlines were generated when the unexplained bear was discovered in the park the next day, including In this newspaper, the New York Times assigned a young environmental journalist named Tatiana Schlossberg to write the story: Yes, another Kennedy unwittingly chronicled her cousin's misadventure:
“Calls were made to a retired Bronx homicide commander, Vernon Gerberth,” Schlossberg wrote. “‘It wouldn’t be a police matter,’ he said, ‘unless the bear was killed by a person, or if someone had it as a pet and brought it to the park. People are crazy.’”
And, of course, weird.
