It took a decade, however the man who left a lifeless bear cub in Central Park finally fessed up in a social media post Sunday.
Why now? As a result of he needed to get forward of a New Yorker profile that included the bear story. The journal additionally obtained {a photograph} of the perpetrator posing with his fingers within the little creature’s bloody mouth, pretending it was biting him.
“Perhaps that’s the place I received my mind worm,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joked to New Yorker author Clare Malone.
Pay attention, I get that Democrats are having lots of enjoyable calling former President Trump and his operating mate, JD Vance, weird — an insult popularized by the entirely-not-weird Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who turned Kamala Harris’ running mate Tuesday. However I’m undecided Trump and Vance can high Kennedy, the impartial presidential candidate who’s the very embodiment of Hunter S. Thompson’s well-known aphorism, “When the going will get bizarre, the bizarre flip professional.”
“Bizarre” barely begins to explain Kennedy, a harmful demagogue who shamelessly trades on his household identify, associates with far-right figures whereas masquerading as a liberal and lies to Individuals about vaccines.
No marvel his household has disavowed him. Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, mentioned on Instagram final month that his cousin’s candidacy is “an embarrassment.”
“He’s buying and selling in on Camelot, movie star, conspiracy theories and battle for private acquire and fame,” mentioned Schlossberg, a Vogue politics author. “I don’t know why anybody thinks he must be president. … Let’s not be distracted, once more, by somebody’s self-importance challenge.”
Kennedy appears to make information solely when he’s accomplished one thing, nicely, bizarre.
The New York Instances reported in Could that Kennedy said doctors had found a dead parasitic worm in his brain in 2010, when he was experiencing mind fog and reminiscence loss. He had initially disclosed that data in a deposition taken whereas he was looking for his second divorce, from Mary Richardson Kennedy. He testified {that a} worm “received into my mind and ate a portion of it after which died,” which was related to the divorce proceedings as a result of he claimed his incomes energy had been diminished by the parasite.
Across the similar time, the Instances reported, Kennedy additionally suffered from mercury poisoning, which might have an effect on cognition, and atrial fibrillation, which he described within the divorce deposition as making him really feel as if “there’s a bag of worms in my chest.”
One other recent report famous that Kennedy posed with the barbecued stays of what he finally claimed was a goat throughout a 2010 journey to South America, although some veterinarians mentioned the animal seemed to be a canine.
However whenever you’re producing information leads like “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been forced to deny that he took a bite out of a dog carcass,” how a lot do the small print actually matter?
The New York Instances printed a puffy story in June about two wild ravens that Kennedy had kind of tamed at his Los Angeles residence. The newspaper reported that the birds had succeeded his pet emu, Toby, who often attacked his spouse, the actor Cheryl Hines, and was later killed by a mountain lion.
Completely not bizarre, amirite?
However again to the bear. Within the video Kennedy posted, he’s telling the story to Roseanne Barr, who acquired about 70,000 votes when she ran for president on the Peace and Freedom Occasion ticket in 2012. It’s unclear why Barr was within the video, however my idea is that it was a gathering of the Bizarre Presidential Candidates Membership.
As Barr listens, Kennedy recounts the tale: On his technique to a falconing outing in upstate New York, he saw a van hit the bear cub. He scooped up the carcass, intending to skin it and put the meat in his refrigerator later. But he was late for dinner at Peter Luger Steak House in New York City, so he didn’t have time to stop at his home in Westchester County. Then dinner ran late, and he needed to get to the airport, so he hatched a plan: “I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike. It would be funny for people,’ ” Kennedy said. He also explained, “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea.”
Harvesting road kill and dumping it in Central Park as a prank, he said, might have been “a little bit of the redneck in me.” Kennedy is a redneck the way Donald Trump Jr. is a blue-collar everyman. No, this was the behavior of a ragingly entitled scion of a rich and famous American clan.
In any case, many headlines were generated when the inexplicable bear was discovered in the park the next day, including in this newspaper. The New York Instances assigned a younger environmental reporter named Tatiana Schlossberg to the story: Sure, one other Kennedy unknowingly chronicled her cousin’s misadventure:
“Calls have been made to a retired Bronx murder commander, Vernon Gerberth,” Schlossberg wrote. “ ‘It wouldn’t be a police matter,’ he mentioned, ‘except the bear was killed by an individual, or if anyone was retaining it as a pet and introduced it to the park. Individuals are loopy.’ ”
And, after all, bizarre.
