Reeling from a bizarre case of bear-dumping, the presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday found himself in an elegant Albany courtroom in a fight to remain on the New York ballot and keep his campaign hopes afloat in the state.
Mr. Kennedy, the political scion whose independent campaign has caused heartburn for both major parties, has been challenged by a group of voters who say he used a false address to try to get on the ballot in New York. He has deep ties in the state, where a surreal scandal has now erupted involving the revelation that he once deposited a dead bear cub in Central Park.
That story, which Mr. Kennedy revealed in a video he posted on social media Sunday, came just before a critical New Yorker profile that included the same anecdote.
It is a doozy, involving the candidate’s saying he found a dead cub by an upstate road in 2014 after a falconry outing, posed for a photo looking as though it was chomping his hand and later showed the dead bear off to friends.
Then, with a flight to catch and no time to deal with the carcass, he left the dead baby bear 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.
Mr. Kennedy said he thought this would be “amusing,” though he seemed to understand that his sense of humor may 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.
Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul have declined so far to comment on the incident, though New York City’s Sanitation Department did remind 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.
Jeff Wernick, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in a statement on 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 to determine if violations occurred.”
He said that state law “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 for these offenses is one year.”
Anyone who had “secret bear disposal” on their campaign 2024 bingo card was probably thrilled. A Kennedy campaign spokeswoman, Stefanie Spear, who attended the proceedings at the Albany courthouse, directed a request for comment back to the video with Ms. Barr.
The scene inside the courtroom — a pristine chamber with a fireplace and walls stacked with law books — was a quiet refuge from the grisly story that swirled around it, though the proceedings posed problems for Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy. Lawyers argued that the candidate had deceived voters about his address when he circulated petitions in New York to get on the November ballot.
In late May, the Kennedy campaign said it had turned in more than three times the required 45,000 valid signatures to get on the state’s ballot. Those petitions listed an address in Katonah, N.Y. The home is a friend’s, the lawyers for the voters say, 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 with those seeking to remove Mr. Kennedy from the ballot in New York, the nation’s fourth largest electoral prize.
Mr. Kennedy’s federal filings for president list a California address. Mr. Kennedy has a home in that state that he shares with his wife, actress Cheryl Hines and — occasionally — some ravens.
The New York case is being backed by Clear Choice, a Democrat-aligned political action committee that is trying to keep Mr. Kennedy off the ballot, saying that tens of thousands of his signatures are invalid.
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.
“New York has been his residence continuously since 1964, and Mr. Kennedy has deep ties to it,” said Mr. Savino, a colorful Buffalo-area lawyer. 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.”
Mr. Savino whiled away the moments when the judge was out of the courtroom by giving updates on the swooning stock market and his thoughts on the 1955 film version of “Guys and Dolls.”
When court was in session, Mr. 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 is expected to testify on Thursday, but did not comment to reporters as he left the courtroom for lunch, surrounded by Secret Service agents and court officers.
But back to the bear: The news of Mr. Kennedy’s ursine unloading was just the latest animal-related revelation during his long-shot campaign, which has also been dogged by his well-known vaccine skepticism and other conspiracy-tinged beliefs. In May, The New York Times revealed that Mr. Kennedy had a dead worm in his brain, a condition that had caused cognitive problems.
And in The New Yorker, Mr. 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.
The finding of the dead bear back in 2014 did cause a commotion. It was investigated by the Department of Environmental Conservation, which found that the bear had died from “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision,” giving the lie to the bike-collision theory that Mr. Kennedy had hoped would be persuasive.
A state manual for dealing with bears concedes that disposing of bear carcasses “can often be a challenge.” It recommends maintaining “a list of possible organizations or people who have an interest in obtaining a bear carcass” — as well as using gloves to handle such road kill.
Despite Mr. 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.”
The post Kennedy Fights to Stay on Ballot, but Everyone’s Talking About the Bear appeared first on New York Times.
