Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (pictured in May) released a video over the weekend recounting a 2014 incident in which he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park and made it look like A prank in a bicycle accident.
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Ten years after the shocking discovery of a dead bear cub in Manhattan’s Central Park, the mystery of who dumped it there has finally been solved.
The person who took responsibility was none other than presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In recent months, the conspiracy theorist-turned-third-party candidate’s campaign has weathered a series of increasingly improbable-sounding scandals, from Kennedy’s admission that a worm ate part of his brain to his denials He once had reports of eating a roasted dog (he said it was a goat).
RFK personally announced the latest news in a three-minute video posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.
In the film, he’s sitting at his kitchen table telling an incredulous Roseanne Barr (yes, the canceled comedian) how the dead bear ended up in his van upstate , and ended up on a bicycle under the bushes in New York City.
Kennedy, an animal lover and former environmental attorney, said he was driving upstate early one morning to take a group of people on a falcon hunt in the Hudson Valley when a driver ahead of him struck and killed a bear cub.
“So I pulled over to the side of the road, picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he explained matter-of-factly. “It’s in really good condition and I’m going to put the meat in the freezer.”
Kennedy added that it is legal in New York state to obtain a bear tag to take home a roadkill bear. Such labels must be written by law enforcement officials.
However, the bear never returned to his home in Westchester.
Kennedy said he was ambushed on a busy day of falconry and had to rush back to New York City for dinner at Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, but it was too late.
“I had to go to the airport and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would be terrible,” Kennedy continued.
Then, as he puts it, “a little bit of redneck in me” had an idea.
Kennedy happened to have an old bicycle in his car and said he was asked to get rid of it. He recalled that the city “had just opened bike lanes” and decided to place the bear in Central Park after a number of serious accidents, as if it had been hit by a bicycle.
“Of course, I wasn’t drinking, but the people I was drinking with thought it was a good idea,” Kennedy said. “So we did it and we thought it would be interesting to people who discover it, or whatever.”
Florence Slatkin and her dog Paco point to the spot where she and a friend found a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park on October 7, 2014.
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Richard Drew/AP
The six-month-old, 44-pound pup was stumbled upon by a dog walker that fateful October morning in an open area of the park, right where thousands of people run and bike every day. Near the trail.
Strangely, one of the New York Times The reporter who reported on this mystery was Tatiana Schlossberg, Kennedy’s niece. “Like law enforcement, when I wrote this story I had no idea who was responsible,” she told the newspaper this weekend.
Law enforcement took the bear to Albany for analysis and determined it had been hit by a car, likely outside the park. They also confiscated the bike to test for fingerprints.
“I was worried because that bike had my footprints all over it,” Kennedy says in the video, eliciting laughter from the room.
But the mystery was never solved, and the story was eventually lost. Now, almost a decade later, Kennedy says he was asked to come clean before the expected election. New Yorker Revealed: “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this,” he captioned the video.
“They ask me, the fact-checker, you know, this is going to be a bad story,” he said with a laugh.
this New Yorker The article, published online Monday morning, puts the Bear anecdote into a broader look at Kennedy’s famously checkered past and motivations for running.
It also includes a photo of Kennedy, then 60, with his hands in the bear’s bloody mouth and an exaggerated grimace on his face.
“Maybe that’s where I got the brain bug,” he told the magazine.
Kennedy also made headlines during the Republican National Convention in July after a leaked call with former President Donald Trump in which the Republican nominee criticized vaccines (a stance for which Kennedy is known) and A vague appeal to Kennedy: “I want you to do something.”
Kennedy apologized to the president and tried to quell speculation, vowing to stay in the race. But in the weeks since President Biden announced his exit, his approval ratings have continued to decline — down to single digits in multiple national polls. His fight to get on the state ballot has reportedly taken a financial toll, and he canceled several campaign appearances last month.
