8-5-2025 -As seen in the New York Times - William F. Savino represents RFK, Jr. - Kennedy Fights to Stay on Ballot, but Everyone’s Talking About the Bear
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disclosure that he had left a cub’s carcass in Central Park overshadowed his court battle to remain on New York State’s ballot this fall.
Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
By Jesse McKinleyChelsia Rose Marcius and Emma G. Fitzsimmons
Jesse McKinley reported from Albany, N.Y., and Chelsia Rose Marcius and Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York City.
- Published Aug. 5, 2024Updated Aug. 7, 2024, 11:28 a.m. ET
Lucas Altman remembers it well: On an early October night in 2014, he had taken his two Labradors to 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,” Mr. Altman, 52, remembered in an interview Monday. “I always thought it had to take somebody kooky to do that.”
This weekend, a most unexpected culprit stepped forward to admit the bear dumping: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Kennedy: a court case in Albany brought by a group of voters trying to have him removed from the ballot, arguing Mr. Kennedy used a false address on tens of thousands of nominating petitions.
The case, which began on Monday, is being backed by Clear Choice, a Democrat-aligned political action committee that is trying to keep Mr. Kennedy off the ballot. Mr. 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 on Monday, lawyers for the four voters who brought the case argued that Mr. Kennedy had been deceitful about his address when he circulated petitions for signatures, and that therefore the signatres on those petitions are invalid.
Mr. Kennedy has a home in Los Angeles he shares with his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines and — occasionally — some ravens. Mr. 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 Mr. Kennedy’s New York petitions listed an address in Katonah, N.Y. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Kennedy from the ballot in New York, which has the fourth most electoral votes in the country.
Mr. 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.
