Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent presidential candidate perhaps best known for his anti-vaccine viewpoints and proclivity for spreading conspiracy theories, admitted he dumped a dead bear in New York’s Central Park back in 2014.
In a video Kennedy posted on X on Sunday, he revealed that he’d left a bike and bear carcass in the park, hoping it would appear that a cyclist had killed the bear, and that it would be “amusing.” It’s a bizarre incident that prompted major news coverage at the time — and that spawned a years-long mystery about how the bear even got there. The story was set to become public as part of a long, critical New Yorker profile of Kennedy, which featured the anecdote, and which seemed to have prompted Kennedy to share his side of it.
The bear incident is also only the latest in myriad problematic acts that Kennedy has been implicated in — including spreading medical misinformation and allegations of sexual misconduct. He’s previously made headlines, too, after sharing that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain. Collectively, these disclosures have all added to a peculiar persona and haphazard policy positions he’s cultivated.
Despite his antics and controversial stances, Kennedy has managed to hang on to a winnowing base of support that’s attracted to his anti-establishment positions, and that believes he’s the only candidate willing to tell it like it is.
A recent FiveThirtyEight polling aggregation shows Kennedy holding about 5.5 percent support in a general presidential election versus Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. That’s down from the 10.3 percent he received in March in FiveThirtyEight’s roundup, when President Joe Biden was still the presumed Democratic nominee.
With Kennedy, progressive scholar Cornel West, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein all among those running as independent or third-party options, it is possible alternative candidates might help decide what is shaping up to be a close election — especially in key swing states that have historically been won by small margins.
The RFK bear incident – and other strange positions – briefly explained
In the X video, Kennedy says he was on his way to a falconing trip in the Hudson Valley, when he saw the car in front of him hit and kill a bear cub.
“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 explained. “It was [in] very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
According to Kennedy, the falconing trip went long and he wasn’t able to make it home before having to run to a dinner in New York City. Because that dinner also took longer than expected, he wasn’t able to bring the bear back to his house prior to a flight he had that same evening.
Faced with these time constraints, Kennedy says he — and those around him — felt that his best option was to deposit the bear in Central Park, and make it look like a bike had killed the cub, because that “would be funny for people.” After doing so, Kennedy says he saw an explosion of news coverage about the incident the next day, and grew worried that he’d find himself in trouble with law enforcement, but never came clean about his involvement until now.
The discovery of the bear spurred an investigation into animal cruelty, and raised questions about how the animal’s carcass made its way into New York City.
It’s not the only concerning incident that has surfaced about Kennedy in the course of his presidential campaign — others have included everything from outrage over him supposedly eating dog to serious allegations of sexual assault. Eliza Cooney, who previously worked as a live-in nanny for his family, alleges that Kennedy groped her in his home and touched her leg in a business meeting. Kennedy has said the piece featuring the sexual assault claim — which was published in Vanity Fair — was “garbage,” but added that he wasn’t a “church boy.” After the Vanity Fair story published, Cooney shared a text Kennedy had sent her with The Washington Post, which stated that he had “no memory of this incident,” but apologized for any actions that may have made her uncomfortable.
That same Vanity Fair story outlines a pattern of strange and disturbing behavior including sending friends nude photos of women and spreading conspiracy theories about everything from Covid-19 to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a pattern the New Yorker profile also highlights. “He can say some crazy shit,” his sister Rory Kennedy once said, according to the Vanity Fair report.
Kennedy’s policy platform has focused heavily on incorrect, anti-vaccine statements linking childhood vaccines with autism, which has been widely debunked by physicians and scientists. One of his organizations is also responsible for paying for a significant proportion of the ads on Facebook promoting falsehoods about vaccines, the New York Times reports. And his stance has been tied to real damage: In one instance, Kennedy and his nonprofit boosted misinformation in American Samoa about vaccines and likely contributed to a massive measles outbreak in the region, FactCheck.org notes. Kennedy has also spread conspiracies about Covid-19, and falsely claimed that it was “ethnically targeted” to avoid harming Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. On the campaign trail, he’s channeled these stances into rhetoric about the importance of protecting people’s “health,” and the need to combat chronic illnesses and get toxins out of food.
Kennedy has a small base of support that could play a role in the election
The people who’ve supported Kennedy have been drawn to him for the same reasons that critics oppose him.
By and large his backers, who span the ideological spectrum, see him as speaking honestly about issues like vaccines in ways that they don’t see politicians in the two parties doing so. Similarly, they view him as someone who’s willing to call out the political establishment, and cite his past record of taking on big businesses as an environmental lawyer.
“He’s not in that party structure. Those political parties are authoritarian and they don’t allow dissent. Anyone who speaks out against the Democratic orthodox is pushed out,” Kevin Nally, a Kennedy supporter and former Democratic voter, told Reuters.
It’s also likely that some of his early support was due to the fact that he offered an alternative to Biden and Trump, both of whom came with their own baggage for many voters. Kennedy’s support appears to have declined as Harris has entered the race, though it could still play a role in the election if he’s able to get on key swing state ballots — something his campaign is still working to do in places like Pennsylvania.
Earlier this year, Kennedy’s campaign said that he had been approved to appear on the Michigan ballot, one of a handful of states that will be a crucial battleground. Previously, former President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by just over 10,700 votes, or roughly 0.3 percentage points. And while Biden beat Trump by just over 3 percentage points in 2020, polls suggest the state may look more like 2016 than 2020 this year.
If Kennedy gets “1 percent in those battleground states that could be decided very narrowly, he could cause one candidate to lose the presidency, or another candidate to win,” University of Virginia political scientist Barbara Perry told Vox.
That dynamic has been evident in the past with third party candidates, including independent businessman Ross Perot in 1992, who was seen as siphoning off support from President George H.W. Bush, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016, who was seen as cutting into the backing of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Research suggests that neither Perot nor Stein actually swung their elections, however.)
Polls suggest that Kennedy could actually have an impact on both parties, since his views run the gamut of more conservative ideas like anti-vaccine positions, and more climate-friendly proposals, like calling for companies to cover the costs of pollution. It’s possible, though, that he’s even more harmful to Trump — despite his Democratic roots — because of their shared stances on vaccine mandates and Covid-19 restrictions. And reports suggest that the former president’s campaign does have some concerns about Kennedy.