Opinion: RFK Jr.'s Central Park 'Bear-B-Q' stunt

Caption

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a campaign announcement at a press conference in Philadelphia on Oct. 9, 2023. / Getty Images

In an election season rife with surprises, you might add this week’s revelation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The independent candidate for president says that 10 years ago he picked up the carcass of a dead bear cub along a country highway and later snuck it into New York’s Central Park, to make it look like the bear had been hit by a bicyclist.

In a video he posted confessing to his old stunt, Kennedy said, “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 … I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”

Kennedy also posed for a photo with the dead bear. He grimaces as if he was being bitten.

Kennedy says he had a dinner in New York and so he drove to the restaurant with the cub’s corpse in his car. He remembered over dinner that he had to catch a flight later that night. Some nights, you might go out to dinner and wonder if you left on a hallway light, and some nights you wonder what you’re going to do with a bear corpse in the back of your car when you have to catch a late-night flight.

Kennedy says he and some friends, who he says had been drinking, while he had not, brought the bear cub’s remains into Central Park and left them there, along with an old bicycle that was also in his car.

Two women discovered the cub the next morning. To quote the New York Post of Oct. 6, 2014, “A baby bear was found dead in Central Park Monday — and police believe it was likely ‘murdered.’” 

A subsequent forensic investigation found that the bear cub was 6 months old, female and weighed 44 pounds. 

Kennedy says in the video that he thought staging the scene would be “amusing.”

Kennedy and his friends hauled the body of a dead bear cub into Central Park, and over the next few days watched news coverage of police and scientific experts scramble to investigate her death.

Some citizens were alarmed to think bears might be moving into Central Park. Many others seemed to be moved by the plight of an innocent bear cub who was run over somewhere, and posthumously dragged into a human stunt. I wonder what the tricksters found so amusing about diverting so many public servants and officials from the real work they have to do trying to investigate real crimes.