Stay updated on Hawaii and national elections coverage
2024 Hawaii & National Election Coverage

Lucas Altman remembers it well: On an early October night in 2014, he had taken his two Labradors to New York’s Central Park when suddenly they became alert, their tails wagging with the thrill of the hunt as they towed him to a patch of shrubbery.

“It was dark, I was getting impatient and I didn’t bother to look,” he said.

A day later, he returned to find out that another resident had made a shocking discovery under the bushes: a dead bear cub, oddly placed under an old bike.

“It was so strange,” Altman, 52, remembered in an interview Monday. “I always thought it had to take somebody kooky to do that.”

Over the weekend, a most unexpected culprit stepped forward to admit the bear dumping: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, the political scion whose independent presidential campaign has caused heartburn for both major parties, said he’d found the baby bear dead on a roadside and posed it as a prank. He revealed the decade-old stunt in a video he posted on social media Sunday, in expectation of a critical New Yorker profile published Monday that included the same anecdote.

Kennedy said he thought the staging would be “amusing,” though he seemed to understand that his sense of humor might not be for everyone.

“It’s going to be a bad story,” he says in the video to Roseanne Barr, a comedian whose sense of humor is also not for everyone.

The story of the roadkill and the confessional video was so bizarrely fascinating that it overshadowed a decidedly more serious challenge for Kennedy: a court case in Albany brought by a group of voters trying to have him removed from the ballot, arguing Kennedy used a false address on tens of thousands of nominating petitions.

The case, which began Monday, is being backed by Clear Choice, a Democrat-aligned political action committee that is trying to keep Kennedy off the ballot. Kennedy is likely to testify on Tuesday.

In late May, the Kennedy campaign said it had turned in more than three times the required 45,000 valid signatures to get on New York’s ballot. But Monday, lawyers for the four voters who brought the case argued that Kennedy had been deceitful about his address when he circulated petitions for signatures, and that therefore the signatures on those petitions are invalid.

Kennedy has a home in Los Angeles he shares with his wife, actress Cheryl Hines and — occasionally — some ravens. Kennedy’s federal filings for president list a California address, and California is also the home of his running mate, Nicole Shanahan. Under a constitutional oddity, presidential and vice-presidential candidates who come from the same state are ineligible to receive its electoral votes. And California is the nation’s richest electoral prize.

But Kennedy’s New York petitions listed an address in Katonah, New York. Lawyers for the voters trying to bounce him from the ballot say that address is not his home but that of a friend, arguing that Kennedy “does not, and has never, resided” there.

“That residency address is not the residence of candidate Kennedy,” said Keith M. Corbett, a lawyer representing those seeking to remove Kennedy from the ballot in New York, the nation’s fourth-largest electoral prize.

Kennedy’s lawyers did not offer an opening statement on Monday, though his lead trial lawyer, William F. Savino, noted in a statement posted on the campaign website that the candidate’s mail is delivered in Katonah, and that his driver’s, fishing and falconry licenses are all from New York.

“New York has been his residence continuously since 1964, and Kennedy has deep ties to it,” Savino, a colorful Buffalo-area lawyer, said in a statement. He added: “He has never claimed any other state as a residency. He intends to move back to New York as soon as his wife retires from acting.”

When court was in session, Kennedy — an environmental lawyer who long fought for cleaning up the Hudson with the group Riverkeeper — took notes and carefully watched testimony before the state Supreme Court judge, Christina L. Ryba. He did not comment about the case to reporters as he left the courtroom, surrounded by Secret Service agents, and answered “No,” when asked if he had any comment on the bear.

In Sunday’s video, however, Kennedy was more loquacious, amiably spinning a tale of finding the dead cub by an upstate road in 2014 while on a falconry outing. He said he wanted to skin the bear — “It was in very good condition,” he said — and keep its meat. (The New Yorker account also included a photo of the candidate looking as if the animal was chomping his hand.)

He then went to a dinner at Peter Luger’s steakhouse in Brooklyn. With a flight to catch and no time to deal with the carcass, Kennedy said he left it in Central Park along with an old bike he happened to have in his car, apparently to suggest a cyclist had mowed down the bear.

“We’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,” he said, adding, “It will be fun, funny for people.”

City and state officials didn’t seem quite as amused: Jeff Wernick, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in a statement Monday that the department had investigated the bear’s death in 2014 and closed the case that year due to a lack of sufficient evidence.

State law, he said, “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.” The statute of limitations is one year, he said.

New York City’s Sanitation Department also reminded residents on Monday morning about how to properly dispose of a dead animal. Their remains should be placed in a sealed heavy duty bag and set out with household trash, along with a taped note saying what was left inside, city officials said. The illustration showed bags labeled Paddington, Fozzie and Gummy.

A Kennedy campaign spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, directed a request for comment back to the video with Barr.

Of course, anyone who had “secret bear disposal” on their campaign 2024 bingo card was probably thrilled, though the news was just the latest animal-related revelation during Kennedy’s long-shot campaign, which has already been dogged by his well-known vaccine skepticism and other conspiracy-tinged beliefs. In May, The New York Times revealed that Kennedy had a dead worm in his brain, a condition that had caused cognitive problems.

And in The New Yorker, Kennedy joked that perhaps his photo with the bear — in which his hand is in the bloody mouth of the little cub — might have had something to do with his parasite.

“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he said.

Despite Kennedy’s past work with Riverkeeper, environmentalists were not impressed by his treatment of the cub, whose mysterious appearance in Central Park a decade ago is now, at least, solved.

“This bizarre incident underscores how terrible Kennedy’s judgment is,” said Brett Hartl, the national political director at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, and “how little remorse he has for his actions.”

For Altman, Kennedy’s confession did have an upside. He said he had spoken to a detective at the time and always wondered about what he called “a very weird situation.”

“In our family, it’s been a mystery for 10 years,” he said. “I figured we’d never find out what happened. And now we know.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company