The independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr will not face New York state charges after admitting that he dumped a dead bear in Central Park in 2014.
“The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) led the 2014 investigation and forensic analysis into the Central Park bear cub and concluded the bear died from blunt-force trauma consistent with a high-speed collision,” the agency said on Monday, as news of Kennedy’s bizarre admission, made in a New Yorker profile, percolated through US media and politics.
Seeking to pre-empt the New Yorker piece, Kennedy told the bear story in video posted to social media on Sunday.
Ten years ago, the bear story briefly mystified New York City. On Monday, as proof of Kennedy’s claims, the New Yorker published a picture of him with the bear, his fingers in its bloodied mouth as he grimaced theatrically.
Had Kennedy admitted his prank at the time, he could have fallen afoul of a state law that “includes offenses such as illegal possession of a bear without a tag or permit and illegal disposal of a bear, both of which are violation-level offenses typically subject to fines of up to $250 for the first offense”.
But, the DEC, said: “The statute of limitations for these offenses is one year; charges cannot be brought for incidents that occurred more than one year ago.”
Kennedy, therefore, is in the clear.
In his video, he said he and some friends found the bear while on a falconry expedition in the Hudson Valley.
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him [actually her] in the back of my van,” Kennedy said, “because I was gonna skin the bear. It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.”
But Kennedy said he “had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad”.
Kennedy and his friends decided to dump the bear in Central Park – and to make it look like it had been hit by a bike.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” Kennedy said. “So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something.”
He was worried, he said, “because my prints were all over that bike”. In the end, no culprit or suspect was named.
In a much remarked-on coincidence, the New York Times reporter who first wrote about the dead bear in 2014, Tatiana Schlossberg, is Kennedy’s cousin.
Both are members of a political dynasty. Kennedy, 70, is the son of Robert F Kennedy, the US attorney general and New York senator who was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968. His uncle John F Kennedy, the 35th president, was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
Schlossberg’s mother is the late president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia.
Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent presidential campaign has alarmed both Republican and Democratic operatives, over the question of whether he will siphon off voters attracted by his vaccine conspiracy theories and other offbeat positions.
But Kennedy has seen support stagnate and struggled to gain ballot access. For instance, he has been fighting a lawsuit which claims he should be kept off the New York state ballot because he actually lives in Los Angeles rather than in the Westchester county home that he lists as a residence.
The woman who owns that property testified on Tuesday that Kennedy pays $500 monthly to rent a room there, according to the Associated Press.
Kennedy has recently flirted with accepting a job from Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, despite texts sent by Kennedy and quoted in the New Yorker profile, which referred to Trump as “a terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath”.
The bear story was only Kennedy’s latest bizarre headline. Earlier this year, the Times reported a claim that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post published a column from the perspective of “RFK Jr’s brain worm”. It insisted: “I had nothing to do with the bear!”
