David Remnick: A week ago, we were getting ready at The New Yorker to publish a piece by staff writer Clare Malone, and I started getting text messages that something kind of odd was going on.

TV Excerpt 1: A bizarre twist to a nearly decade-old mystery in Central Park where a bear cub was discovered dead. Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Junior has now confessed to putting it there.

TV Excerpt 2: In a video that was apparently intended to blunt the impact of a negative news story that had not yet come out.

TV Excerpt 3: He tells Roseanne Barr that he was responsible for a dead bear cub that turned up in Central Park in 2014.

Robert F. Kennedy: Luckily, the story died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade, and The New Yorker somehow found out about it.

David Remnick: Clare Malone joins us now. Clare, you just published a profile of Robert F. Kennedy Junior, but Kennedy tried to get ahead of your story a day before publication by explaining on video via social media a certain incident that you covered in your reporting. Then he shared the video, which appears to be shot in a kitchen.

Clare Malone: He's in a kitchen, and he is telling it to Roseanne Barr.

David Remnick: What is Roseanne Barr doing in that kitchen?

Clare Malone: My best guess, being a close Robert F. Kennedy junior watcher these past few months, is that he and Roseanne were taping a podcast sometime in the last week or so. That also coincided with the time which we were fact-checking my profile.

David Remnick: Okay, so he's gotten a call from your fact checkers telling him what?

Clare Malone: Well, he's gotten a call from me because in the reporting process, once you've reported something out, then you have to go to the individual for comment, so I called Bobby Kennedy the other week and put the story to him. On the phone, he did not tell me this. He declined to go much further than saying, "Maybe that's where I got my brain worm."

David Remnick: Right, but he didn't deny the story.

Clare Malone: He did not deny the story. No.

David Remnick: We give him credit for something.

Clare Malone: Yes. Then this video was posted the day before my story was supposed to come out. I think this was his trying to get out ahead of it or trying to pre-spin it, as they might say.

David Remnick: His version of the story is pretty similar to the one that you published in The New Yorker. For those few lonely souls on the planet who have not yet read the piece or watched the Bobby Kennedy video on Twitter, what exactly is the story at hand?

Clare Malone: I mean, the general gist of the story is 10 years ago in 2014, when he was 60 years old, Bobby Kennedy-

David Remnick: -a grown ass man, as we now say.

[laughter]

Clare Malone: Your words, not mine, David. He was taking a group of people out for a falconry event. He's a lifelong falconer. He's a master falconer. If you read my piece, his lifelong love of animals in a very interesting, unique way is a thread. Anyway, he's a falconer. Going to the falconry event, he came across a dead bear. In his version of the story--

David Remnick: In upstate New York.

Clare Malone: In upstate New York, yes. In his version of the story, a woman hid it, and he decided to pick the bear up, put it in his trunk. He took a few pictures of it.

David Remnick: Of him with the dead bear, which we published [laughs].

Clare Malone: Which we published. Then at some point later that evening, he has a really great idea. He goes into Central Park and sets up, I guess, a tableau of the baby bear, a 44-pound dead baby bear. He wants to set up a tableau with a bear and a bicycle that makes it look as if the bear is being hit by a bicycle.

David Remnick: As if a bicycle hitting a bear would kill the bear.

Clare Malone: Correct, yes. Again, in his telling to Roseanne, he says it's because there had been a spate of, I guess, bike lane accidents in New York about a decade ago.

Robert F. Kennedy: People have gotten badly injured. Every day it was in the press. I thought, I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of. I said, let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like it got hit by a bike. [laughter] Funny for people.

David Remnick: Now, according to a speech, and we discovered this in later reporting, vigorous journalistic search, according to a speech by Robert F. Kennedy Junior's daughter, what?

Clare Malone: In 2006, she gave a little--

David Remnick: This is Kick Kennedy.

Clare Malone: Who went by Kate Kennedy at that point. She's giving a student address at her graduation, and she says, "I love my parents. My father taught me many things, to skin dead animals, never to pass roadkill without putting it in your car, to plunge yourself into any body of water before testing the temperature." Anyway, and we should say in the video, he says that the reason why he picked up the bear and put it in his trunk is that he was thinking of skinning it later for meat.

David Remnick: This piece ran how many words, Clare?

Clare Malone: I think close to 10. I actually don't know.

David Remnick: 10,000 words, so in around 10,000 words-

Clare Malone: There's other stuff in it.

David Remnick: -there's a two paragraph passage about the dead bear story. Why did Kennedy think that the dead bear story would get a lot more attention than lots of material about bad behavior as a young man having to do with drugs and womanizing and worse. That is not limited to when he was young, but he wanted to get out in front of this.

Clare Malone: Yes, it's interesting. Although I have tried to put myself inside the head of Bobby Kennedy for the past few months, I can't put myself inside his head on that one, perhaps because it had been unreported previously. The piece itself tracks-- It has a lot of very tragic things, both having to do with his life. I mean, his father was assassinated when he was 14. He had a huge drug problem. His second wife committed suicide during a very bitter divorce.

There's a lot of dark stuff, actually, in the profile. In some ways, the bear incident is, I think, one of many things that are in the piece that I think paint the portrait of-- In some ways, he's a very talented person, charming, charismatic is how people describe him, but also, there is a weird element. There's some weirdness. I guess weird is the word of the moment, I guess, and zeitgeist. I think we can agree that this incident is genuinely kind of weird, and it's an odd story. Right.

David Remnick: Let's explore a couple of the oddities. He shoves the bear in the car, and he relays on, and he doesn't tell you, sadly, but he tells Twitter and Roseanne Barr that he was going to skin the bear and use the meat to eat later. Then we cut to the fact that he's then going out to dinner at Peter Luger's.

Clare Malone: Yes. A steakhouse.

David Remnick: You'd think he'd be pretty full after that and in no mood to skin a bear and put it in the fridge, much less eat it.

Clare Malone: It also turns out in the video, per his telling, that actually he was going to go to the airport, too, so he didn't want to leave the dead bear in the trunk of his car, which is why he dumped it in Central Park.

David Remnick: It's a scheduling problem. You know, it seems to me that the Kennedy candidacy has had different phases. For a while, there was the spoiler phase, the really serious. Will he be Ralph Nader in one way or another, or Ross Perot? Have we reached the comic depths of this campaign? Where are we now?

Clare Malone: I mean, I think he's-- you know, as one pollster who I talked to in the spring, when Kennedy was polling pretty well, anywhere between 10% and 15%, depending on what poll you look at--

David Remnick: Which is the most since Ross Perot in '92.

Clare Malone: Yes, correct. That pollster said to me, "Listen, he's going to end up being more like Gary Johnson in 2016." Gary Johnson ended up getting 3% of the popular vote. The idea was, basically, in this election, especially when Biden was the candidate for the Democrats, everyone had negative views on both candidates. Traditional Democratic Party voters didn't want to vote for Biden. I think what's really turned things for the Kennedy, you know, polling numbers is there are these younger Black or Latino voters who might be saying, actually, I don't want to vote for an independent party candidate now. I feel more comfortable voting for Harris, or there's also just the idea that the closer we get to the actual election, the more people, even if they say, "Oh, I'm an independent," the closer they actually get to, "I might actually going to vote for this third party candidate in the end of the day?"

David Remnick: Do you think he might hurt Trump?

Clare Malone: Yes, I mean, listen, he is still an entity to be dealt with in these, let's say, seven or so swing states.

David Remnick: He's on the [crosstalk] [unintelligible 00:09:25] .

Clare Malone: Well, he's not on the ballot everywhere, but, you know, he could make a difference in a few states. There are still, we're in the period where he could still get on the ballot in a couple of key places. There's a potential for him to rock the boat a bit. He is, at this point, I think, seen more as a spoiler for Trump. In the past month, we've seen Trump kind of make outreach to Kennedy, essentially, I think, floating, "Would you ever drop out and maybe be interested in a cabinet position?" I do think for all the obvious oddity and farce associated with the bear story, I mean, Kennedy has a huge following among a certain segment of the population.

He has a huge ability to disseminate misinformation about vaccines. I think if Trump wins the election, it's not a crazy thought to think that perhaps Kennedy could have some influential position. Even if he didn't get a spot in the administration or in Trump's orbit, he still has pretty big reach digitally and a pretty big set of followers. He's certainly an odd figure in American life, but not without power.

David Remnick: Clare, he's not going to win the election. I think it's pretty obvious. What's his goal staying in?

Clare Malone: Yes, you know, I do think that there was a period during the election when he did think that he could win. I have a sense that more and more he's potentially becoming a realist about that. I think he is probably eager to have a post in a Trump administration or Harris administration, I should say. The campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy told me that he would also accept any offers from a Harris administration. I think at this point he probably wants some sort of official-

David Remnick: Affirmation.

Clare Malone: Yes, yes. Position, piece of power.

David Remnick: We should end by saying the last piece of Kennedy merch to appear on his website. Is it Kennedy for president? Teddy bear?

Clare Malone: A teddy bear. That's right. Lean in.

David Remnick: Clare Malone, thanks so much.

Clare Malone: Thanks for having me.

David Remnick: Clare Malone's profile of Robert F. Kennedy Junior, dead bear and all, is at newyorker.com.

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