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By Flynn Nicholls
US News Reporter
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Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s recent admission that he was behind the dumping of a dead bear cub in New York's Central Park has sparked a deluge of jokes and memes on social media.
The story originally made headlines in 2014 when a woman found the dead cub while walking her dog. On Sunday, Kennedy shed new light on the case, admitting it was he who left the cub there. He gave an account of the events in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, ahead of an upcoming New Yorker article he said was going to break the story.
To add to the bizarreness of the revelation, the 2014 New York Times report of the incident, titled "Bear Found in Central Park Was Killed by a Car, Officials Say," was written by Tatiana Schlossberg—the daughter of Kennedy's first cousin Caroline Kennedy.
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Kennedy posted a video on Sunday with the caption: "Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker." In it he told Roseanne Barr that ten years ago, he was on a falconry trip with a woman who ran over and killed a bear cub in New York's Hudson Valley. He put the cub in his van because he wanted to skin it and put the meat in his refrigerator.
But he said the hunting day went late, and he had to go direct to New York City for a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, rather than to his Westchester home where he could have dropped off the bear corpse.
At the end of the dinner, Kennedy said he needed to go to the airport so could not leave the bear in his van. He instead suggested to friends, who he said were drinking alcohol but that he was not, that they dump the corpse in Central Park and make it look like it was hit by a bicycle.
"Everybody thought that's a great idea to do that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something. But the next day it was, like, on every television station. And it was the front page of every paper. And I turned on the TV and there was, like, a mile of yellow tape. And there were helicopters flying over and I was like, oh my God, what did I do?"
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Kennedy said he was worried about getting caught through fingerprints. However, the story died down after a while, until, he said in the video, that the New Yorker recently found out it was him. "It's going to be a bad story," he said. The video had been viewed 8.8 million times by Monday morning.
Newsweek contacted Kennedy's campaign for comment by email.
"An infinite number of monkeys could type for a million years and STILL not predict whatever the next RFK Jr. headline is gonna be," user @JudeAtwood wrote on X.
Another posted a meme of Kermit the Frog talking to a hooded, evil Sith Lord from Star Wars "RFK Jr.: I should drive past that dead bear. The worm in RFK Jr's brain: Stage a bike accident," it said.
User @HankGreen, a video blogger, wrote "Trump just absolutely champing at the bit trying to get the news cycle back on him and then RFK jr. pops out of a cake screaming, "A DECADE AGO I STAGED THE MURDER OF A BEAR CUB IN CENTRAL PARK!!!"
User @JoshGondelman wrote "Kristi Noem: No one will top my bizarre animal killing stories. RFK Jr.: Hold my bear," a reference to the South Dakota governor who controversially recalled she shot her pet dog earlier in the year.
User @DougJBallon, who runs an account making satirical ideas for New York Times articles, pitched a headline about how Kennedy's experiences represent normal American lives: "In this Ohio town, it was a tradition: morning mass, biscuits and gravy at Bob Evans, then over to Central Park to dump the body of a dead bear cub. But now the woke mob is taking all of that away."
The dead bear is the latest in a series of bizarre stories to have surfaced during Kennedy's campaign. In May, it was revealed that a tape worm ate a portion of his brain and then died, while in July, a photo surface of him eating a carcass that was reportedly a dog. He said the carcass was a goat.
Kennedy said in his announcement speech "I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world."
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