Nothing screams “presidential damage control” like spilling the beans on your Central Park bear carcass hoax to Roseanne Barr over coffee and dog meat.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to win the White House as an unlikely and unhinged third-party candidate continues to be a comedy of errors, one which Kennedy’s wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines, probably hoped would start to look less like an episode of her best-known work the closer it came to November. In May, Kennedy revealed that his doctors found a dead worm in his head that had eaten a portion of his brain. In July, a viral and macabre photo showed Kennedy posing with the barbecued body of an animal that many believed to be a dog, and a profile accused the presidential hopeful of sexually assaulting an old family baby sitter.
Unfortunately for both Hines and what’s left of the dignity in the name Kennedy, the series of insane gaffs and scandals that have driven Kennedy’s polling numbers all the way down to a measly 4 percent continued over the weekend, when Hines’ husband attempted to get ahead of an unseemly story featured in a New Yorker article about Kennedy’s campaign as well as his current and past missteps.
Yesterday, Kennedy posted a roughly three-minute-long video on Twitter and Instagram with the snarky caption, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @newyorkermag,” in which he admitted to being the culprit behind the staging of a viral Central Park incident in 2014, wherein park-goers found a dead bear cub next to an abandoned bicycle, while chatting with ultra-conservative comedian Barr in front of a cluttered kitchen table.
Somehow, Barr being involved in the most uncanny RFK Jr. story to date is her least upsetting career development in years.
In the video, Kennedy, an avid falconer and outdoorsman, described a hunting trip he took to Upstate New York, during which he witnessed a minivan strike and kill a bear cub and leave the carcass on the road. “So 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,” Kennedy told Barr. “And it was very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
However, Kennedy’s hawking plans ran overtime, and the socialite soon realized that he wouldn’t have time to properly skin and clean the bear cub before his next engagement. “Instead of going back to my home in Westchester, I had to go right to the city, because there was a dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House,” Kennedy explained.
“So then I thought, you know, at that time – this was the little bit of the redneck in me. There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York, they had just put in the bike lanes,” Kennedy said to Barr of the thought-process that led to a national news story. “I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of, and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in the Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike, it would be fun, funny for people.’”
Kennedy’s falconry companions, whom the presidential hopeful made a point of describing as slightly drunk, thought the plan was brilliant, and they helped him dump the bear body in Manhattan’s prized park.
Quickly, however, the discovery of a dead bear cub in Central Park became a minor crisis. “The next day, it was like, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper,” Kennedy recalled to Barr. “I turned on the TV, and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. What did I do?’”
Instead of addressing the extreme prank he played on Central Park and saving conservationists the time and resources they wasted on investigating the incident, Kennedy decided to wait out the news cycle, and he’s only now explaining the incident to Barr because The New Yorker found the picture he and his buddies had taken of the presidential “candidate” pretending to get bitten by the bloodied bear cub corpse.
Barr, for her participation in Kennedy’s newest nonsense, seems similarly surprised by Kennedy’s public confession, and she took a brief break from reposting QAnon conspiracy theories earlier today in order to explain that she had no part in planting the story. “This was not filmed by me or my team,” Barr wrote in a tweet. “This was off the cuff after the interview. There is no spin here – just a funny story. It’s nice to see RFK finally get some press – albeit during an economic crash by the Biden Harris administration. Great job journos!”
Well, at least we all know RFK Jr.’s plan to get the economy back on track — everyone better start investing in roadkill now to get ahead of November.