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RFK Jr. confessed to placing a dead bear in Central Park. Crisis management expert explains why his PR strategy backfired

 Kennedy posted a video on his X account to get ahead of a New Yorker magazine profile that revealed he was responsible for the 2014 incident that made headlines back then.

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A woman wearing a red jacket walking a dog on a leash points to where she discovered a dead bear in Central Park.
Florence Slatkin points to where she discovered a dead bear cub in Central Park, on Oct. 7, 2014. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently admitted to leaving the cub there. AP Photo/Richard Drew

On Aug. 5, The New Yorker magazine published one of its signature profiles, this time about presidential candidate Robert F, Kennedy Jr. 

Buried paragraphs into the story — which spans Kennedy’s life from his father’s assassination to his current campaign — is the reveal that Kennedy left the carcass of a young bear in Central Park in 2014 and staged it to look like the cub had been killed by a bicyclist.

Kennedy tried to get out ahead of the news by posting a three-minute clip to his X account the day before The New Yorker profile dropped, recounting the story to actress Roseanne Barr. 

“Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one,” Kennedy wrote, tagging The New Yorker. 

This tactic of “getting ahead” of a news story is helpful when the story doesn’t include all the facts and context. But this was not the case here, said Peter Mancusi, an attorney, crisis manager and associate teaching professor of journalism at Northeastern University. 

“What The New Yorker published was really two paragraphs,” Mancusi said. “His video was worse in the sense … that it drew more attention to the incident. I don’t think it’s very smart because I don’t think it preempted anything. It called more attention to the piece and the bear incident itself. 

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants you to get his news straight from the horse’s mouth. A crisis management expert explains why that may not always be the best strategy. #RobertFKennedyJr #Kennedy #RFKJr #Election #Election2024 #BabyBear #CentralPark #Twitter #News #Journalism

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In the clip, Kennedy, Barr and the videographer chuckle as he recounts the story of how, in 2014, he collected the dead bear from the side of the road while hunting in Goshen, New York, with the intent of skinning it at home, but left it in Central Park after realizing he had to catch a flight and wouldn’t be able to take it home before departing.

“The bear was in my car and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car as that would’ve been bad,” Kennedy says in the clip. “This was a little bit of the redneck in me. We thought it’d be amusing for whoever found it.”

When The New Yorker asked Kennedy about the bear for the piece, he replied “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” referring to another news story from this year when he said he had a parasitic worm that ate a portion of his brain years ago.

In this case, the context Kennedy added to the story does not improve the situation, Mancusi said. Nor does it reflect any real strategy when it comes to public relations.

Headshot of Peter Mancusi.
Peter Mancusi, associate teaching professor of journalism at Northeastern, said RFK addressing the bear cub incident only drew more attention to it. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

“It certainly wasn’t helpful to people who were inclined to think that he is a fringe person,” Mancusi added. “I can’t think of anybody reading that anecdote or seeing his video and saying, ‘I was on the fence about Bobby, but I think I’ll vote for him.’ 

“I don’t think any grand strategy went into this. I think what he did was say ‘if this story is going to come out, I’m going to be the one that breaks it.’”

In posting the video about the bear incident — and sharing other posts about it afterward — Mancusi said Kennedy is also generating interest about the piece from people who might not have read it otherwise. The New Yorker piece does not reveal much new information about Kennedy other than the bear incident, Mancusi added, so it might’ve flown under the radar had the candidate not posted about it.

“What it accomplished is that it drew more attention to a very controversial piece about him,” Mancusi said. “The New Yorker is a great magazine. … (But) there is almost no facet of this piece that hasn’t been out there before. How many people would have seen that article or read that article, but for this preemptive video? I don’t think a lot of people would have known about it if he hadn’t gone out and made the video.”

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