Stephen Colbert Revives RFK Jr. Bear Story With Savage Crack at HHS Chief’s Heavy Breathing at Hearing

Stephen Colbert cracked that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounded “like a bear getting autoerotic asphyxiated” at his Senate hearing on Thursday, reviving a bizarre and notorious story that the Trump cabinet member can’t shake.

Kennedy admitted in 2024 that he was responsible for leaving a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park 10 years earlier after he picked up the animal he claimed a woman had hit with her van.

At the time, the incident was a national story in the press, first published by one of his own relatives in The New York Times.

During his Late Show opening monologue, Colbert hit at Kennedy over brand new revelations in an upcoming book that he “once sliced off a dead raccoon’s penis while his wife and kids waited in the minivan.”

“He took the genitals so he could, quote, study them later,” Colbert said.

Then, rounding on the hearing, which he noted was supposed to be about “slashing the HHS’s new budget” the host said that the “weirdest part” of the televised session “wasn’t” what Kennedy said but “what he breathed.”

“Listen to the health secretary on the mic while being questioned,” Colbert said.

The host then rolled back a video of Kennedy being questioned by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), during which the Health Secretary could be heard rasping through the live mic.

Kennedy’s distinctive voice is the result of spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition that affects speech. Spasms of vocal cord muscles caused by the condition, however, can cause noisy and labored breathing.

Cutting back to the studio, Colbert quipped: “Is that a good sign when your health secretary breathes like a walrus snorting lobster bisque?”

He continued, pointedly reviving Kennedy’s Central Park bear story: “If he sounds like a bear getting autoerotic asphyxiated?”

“Like he’s the first person in history to need a CPAP while awake?” he asked, tripling down.

Colbert then used the moment to pivot to a totally unrelated story about a study that found salmon exposed to cocaine swam “twice as far” in a week as those in the control group, and joked they were “three times more likely to start a band.”

Watch above via CBS.

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