A day after the New Yorker magazine story broke, saying Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disposed of a dead bear in Central Park a decade ago, the independent presidential candidate wrote a defiant response on X directed at mainstream media outlets.
Kennedy’s Aug 6 post referenced multiple disparaging stories published about him this year, to which he said, “The more you smear me, the more I'll keep speaking.”
One story from May, by The New York Times, reported that in a 2012 divorce deposition, Kennedy said a worm ate part of his brain.
According to the legal papers cited by the Times, in 2010 Kennedy suffered severe memory loss and mental fog. He was at first diagnosed with a brain tumor but then another doctor reviewing his scan thought it might be “caused by a worm that got into [his] brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” the Times reported. No treatment was required and the symptoms cleared up, Kennedy told the paper.
The magazine consulted a veterinarian who said the animal in the photo was likely a dog because of its ribs.
Kennedy said the animal in the photo was a goat, and the image was taken in Patagonia.
“Every time you write ‘barbecued goat', I will invoke normalized government censorship, vanishing topsoil, threatened wilderness, the epidemics of addiction and loneliness, the deaths of despair, and the world’s largest chronic disease burden,” Kennedy said in the X post.
“Every time you write ‘vaccine crank’, I will remind you of an industry with a well-documented track record of putting profits before people, an industry with unreliable regulatory oversight, an industry which is one of the most powerful entities in the world.
“Every time you write ‘fringe', I will remind you of my pledge to heal the divide and center us in our shared humanity.
“Every time you write ‘brain worm', I will mention our blundering foreign policy, which has helped bring our precious earth to the brink of World War III,” he added.
On Aug. 4, after learning that the New Yorker would publish the bear in Central Park story the next day, Kennedy posted a video on X that recounted the circumstances that cleared up a mystery that had baffled New York City for a decade.
The clip shows Kennedy sitting with comedian Roseanne Barr and detailing how he and a group of friends found a dead bear and eventually placed the carcass in Central Park under a crumpled bicycle.
It was 2014, and the group was driving through New York’s Hudson Valley on a falconry trip. Kennedy said he saw a woman driving a van in front of them strike a young bear.
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van,” he said. “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 explained.
New York state law allows taking home a roadkill bear with “a bear tag,” he said.
Later that day, Kennedy said he went to dinner in New York City.
“At the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn’t go home, 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.”
Kennedy said that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in the headlines, and he had an old bicycle in his vehicle. So he came up with the idea of staging an accident in Central Park, making it look like the bear was hit by a bike.
“So we went and did that and thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy told Barr.
A media frenzy ensued after a couple walking their dog discovered the bear carcass on Oct. 6, 2014.
Law enforcement transported the bear to Albany for analysis and determined it had been struck by a car.
“I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars. There were like helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’” Kennedy told Barr.
“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike. Luckily, the story died after a while.”
Kennedy resurrected the story a day before the New Yorker published a feature that included the bear anecdote and an in-depth report on his campaign.
Social media has been ablaze with wide-ranging reactions since the story was released.
A New York State Department of Environmental Conservation spokesperson told UPI on Aug. 5 that the department investigated the incident and forensic analysis found that the bear cub had died from “trauma consistent with a high-speed collision.”
The statute of limitations for that type of offense is one year.
In April 2023, Kennedy announced his candidacy to challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democrat Party’s presidential nomination.
After encountering multiple roadblocks from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and claiming that the organization was “rigging the primary” to favor Biden to prevent other candidates from competing, in October 2023, Kennedy decided to run as an independent.
Since then, Kennedy has focused on gaining ballot access in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, but his campaign has still run up against a series of problems.
Earlier this year, the DNC announced the creation of a team to counter third-party and independent presidential candidates.
It hired Lis Smith, a veteran Democrat strategist who managed Pete Buttigieg’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, to spearhead an aggressive communication plan to counter Kennedy, independent Cornel West, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
Kennedy has told The Epoch Times that he believes mainstream media coverage like the reports about the brain worm, the photo of him eating an animal that appeared to be a dog, and the dead bear in the Central Park incident are tied to the DNC.
Kennedy has injected humor into his responses to some reports.
In the New Yorker article, he said “maybe that’s where I got my brain worm” in response to a photo that showed him with his hand inside the mouth of a dead bear cub.
On the same day that The New Yorker article was released, Kennedy posted his first attack on X before the more detailed response on Aug. 6.
“The press is often called the ‘Fourth Estate,’ to emphasize its independence and high purpose. But these days it is in eerie, almost comical lockstep, amplifying trivial stories to damage disfavored political figures.”
“Brothers won’t speak to each other because of partisan loyalties. Small towns sink under addiction and depression. And the world careens toward WWIII. Let’s hold our media to a higher standard!”
