Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has admitted he once dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, is selling a Kennedy 2024 teddy bear on his campaign website.
The teddy bear wears a white “Kennedy Sanahan 2024” T-shirt and a bow tie and retails for $32.
The description reads “cuddle up with the Kennedy Shanahan 2024 Teddy Bear, dressed in a campaign T-shirt. This adorable bear not only offers comfort but also spreads a message of hope and support for the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket, making it a perfect gift for supporters of all ages.” An archived version of the website shows it has been on sale since at least April, 2024.
Newsweek contacted Kennedy’s campaign for comment via email early Monday morning.
In 2014, a woman walking her dog in Central Park discovered a dead bear cub in Central Park, making headlines and sparking investigations because bears had not been seen in Manhattan for centuries.
On Sunday, Kennedy admitted it was him, ahead of an upcoming New Yorker article which was apparently going to break the story.
Kennedy posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, with the caption: “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker.” In it he told Roseanne Barr that ten years ago, he was on a falconry trip with a woman who ran over and killed a bear cub in New York’s Hudson Valley. He put the cub in his van because he wanted to skin it and put the meat in his refrigerator.
But the hunting trip went late and instead of heading home afterward, he had to go directly to a New York City steakhouse, with the corpse still in the van, and after the dinner he could not return home because he had to go to the airport.
He explained that, at that time, several bike accidents had occurred in New York City’s bike lanes adjacent to Central Park. He had an old bicycle in his van and said to his friends that they should dump the baby bear corpse in the park near the bike lane and make it look like it was run over by a bicycle.
“This was the little bit of the redneck in me,” Kennedy said. “Everybody thought that’s a great idea to do that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it.”
The dead bear is the latest in a series of bizarre stories to have surfaced during Kennedy’s campaign. In May, it was revealed that a tape worm ate a portion of his brain and then died, while in July, a photo surface of him eating a carcass that was reportedly a dog. He said the carcass was a goat.
