RFK Jr. Just Made His Dead Bear Cub Story Even Weirder

Ready or not, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has more dead animal stories up his sleeve.

The independent presidential candidate has doubled down on his side-of-the-road hunting strategies, telling reporters outside an Albany courthouse on Wednesday that he had picked up roadkill his “whole life” and has a “freezer full of it.”

Journalists reportedly took the anecdote for a joke until Kennedy’s campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear clarified that he had been serious and that Kennedy uses the meat to feed his ravens, according to the Associated Press. Spear also added that the presumptive Kennedy heir no longer had the “21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator” used for storing the meat at his Westchester County residence.

While salvaging roadkill for meat isn’t unheard of in more rural areas of the country, it’s also a strange topic for any presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Kennedy’s bizarre story of picking a dead bear cub off the road, posing with its slashed carcass, driving it down to Manhattan, and staging it in Central Park a decade ago has been met with national shock, with some critics accusing Kennedy of animal abuse.

The disturbing tale—which was originally reported on by Kennedy’s relative for The New York Times in 2014—was tied to Kennedy in a New Yorker exposé on Monday. In response, Kennedy quipped that “maybe that’s where [he] got [his] brain worm,” referring to a 2010 incident in which he suffered from “brain frog” and short-term memory loss that he chalked up to a parasitic worm in his head.

Kennedy had hoped to stave off any buzz created by the New Yorker article. Before the story was published, Kennedy posted a video to his X account in which he made light of the whole event, bizarrely telling actress Roseanne Barr (of all people) that he had originally thought to skin the cub before telling friends at a dinner that it would instead be funnier to leave it in the heavily trafficked park.

“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 Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy said in the video. “Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So we did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”