Overview

RFK Jr. Dead Bear Cub Story refers to the revelation that longshot 2024 United States Presidential Election candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was responsible for dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, New York City in 2014. The mysterious appearance of the dead bear made headlines in 2014 but went unexplained for nearly a decade until 2024 when Kennedy admitted to being responsible for disposing of the bear in order to "get ahead" of an upcoming story in The New Yorker. His revelation then resulted in widespread media coverage and reactions online, including memes.

Background

On October 6th, 2014, a dead black bear cub was found in Central Park,^[1] New York City, baffling New Yorkers and media outlets, as Black Bears are not local to the city nor do they appear in the Central Park Zoo. It appeared that the bear had been hit by a car.

On August 4th, 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longshot Presidential candidate in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, posted a video admitting to the story as a way of getting ahead of it coming out in an upcoming article in the New Yorker. In the video, he is telling the story to actress Roseanne Barr, receiving over 11.7 million views and 16,000 likes on his X / Twitter^[6] post in one day (seen below).

In the video, he explains he hit a bear cub on his way to a falconing expedition in upstate New York. He believed the bear looked in good enough condition to skin and save its meat, so he stashed the carcass in his car. It is legal to do this with bear roadkill in New York State, but one must report it to the authorities, which Kennedy did not do. After his falconing expedition, he traveled south to New York City for dinner at steakhouse Peter Luger. After dinner, he realized he could not get home that evening to skin the bear, and thus dumped it in Central Park along with an old bike, believing it would be "amusing" for whoever found it.^[2]

Developments

The story shocked social media users, particularly coming off a recent controversy surrounding a picture of Kennedy holding what was believed to be the carcass of a dead dog, and inspired jokes in early August 2024.

For example, on August 4th, 2024, Twitter user @BenjySarlin^[3] posted an Evil Kermit meme joking about RFK Jr.'s thought process during the incident, gaining over 1,900 retweets and 20,000 likes in one day (shown below, top). The same day, Twitter user @pourmecoffee^[4] joked about the ludicrousness of the story in a tweet that gained over 25 retweets and 190 likes in one day (shown below, bottom).

On August 5th, The New Yorker^[5] published its story featuring the RFK Jr. "bear" anecdote. The New Yorker published a picture Kennedy took of himself with the bear carcass (shown below). Kennedy joked with the publication, "Maybe that's where I got my brain worm," referring to the revelation that he lived with a brain parasite that ate part of his brain before it died. However, Kennedy was confirmed to have contracted the brain worm before the bear incident.

Related Memes

RFK Jr. Confessing

RFK Jr. Confessing, also known as RFK Jr. "So It's X," refers to a series of memes using a photo of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sitting with his arms crossed, wearing a blue shirt and tie, confessing to famous disasters and contentious events, often alongside the phrasal template "So It's X and I'm Y" that begins with a date and year and then the story. The image macro was from a video that RFK Jr. posted to Twitter / X in August 2024 in which he confessed to the Dead Bear Story.

Search Interest

External References