Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a video on social media in which he admitted to discarding a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park in 2014.
The video, posted on his X account on Sunday, shows him alongside controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr describing the bizarre circumstances leading up to the incident that baffled New Yorkers 10 years ago .
Mr Kennedy said a woman hit and killed the bear with her car while he was driving outside the city and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning it and harvesting its meat.
It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of a New Yorker magazine story published on Monday.
Mr. Kennedy was “excited” when he spotted the bear during a falconry outing in upstate New York, The New Yorker reported. When he spotted the bear, he loaded it into the back of his truck.
One of the images in the article showed Mr. Kennedy making a face as he put his hand into the dead bear’s bloody mouth.
The magazine quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying that Mr. Kennedy “thought it would be funny to make it look like an errant cyclist.”
The description was broadly similar to one provided by Mr. Kennedy over the weekend.
in the videoMr. Kennedy, who sat with his sleeves rolled up at a table filled with food, told Ms. Barr that 10 years ago he was driving to meet a group of people going falcon hunting near Goshen, New York, when the bear was killed.
“I’m going to skin the bear – it’s in really good condition – and I’m going to put the meat in the freezer,” he said. “Here’s what you can do in New York state: put a bear tag on a roadkill bear.”
New York state does allow people to take bears killed on the road, but the law states that a person must notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to obtain such a tag.
Mr. Kennedy does not appear to have done so.
Instead, he said he continued his falconry into the night. He said he went ahead and made a dinner reservation at the Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) south of Goshen.
“By the end of dinner, it was getting very late and I realized I couldn’t go home,” Mr. Kennedy said. “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 bad.”
That’s when it occurred to him, he said, that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle on board.
He told Ms. Barr about his idea to stage a bicycle accident with a bear carcass in Central Park, and several of the drunks with him wholeheartedly agreed. He emphasized that he did not drink.
“So we did it and we thought it would be interesting to anyone who finds it or something,” he said. “The next day… it was on every TV station. It was on the front page of every newspaper, and I turned on the TV and saw a mile of yellow tape and 20 police cars and helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. What, what did I do?
He then noted that a fact-checker from The New Yorker called him to ask if he was involved in dumping the bear carcass, which seemed to prompt him to post the footage.
The bear’s carcass was reportedly discovered by a woman walking her dog in the famous New York park, where bears are an unusual sight. Story written by The New York Times in 2014. Reports say it was placed under some bushes and an abandoned bicycle.
The newspaper noted at the time that the New York Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Team was investigating the bear’s death, and that the New York Department of Environmental Protection concluded that the animal died in a “motor vehicle collision” — not a bicycle accident. ACCIDENT.
The NYPD and Department of Environmental Protection did not respond to requests for comment.
The New York Times report noted how puzzling the 2014 incident was to those following the case: “But many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there any involvement? Murder? Did she die in the park?
Oddly enough, the decade-old newspaper story happened to be told by another member of the famed Kennedy family, Tatiana Schiff, a former New York Times reporter and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy. Written by Losberg.
While many members of the Kennedy family deny Mr. Kennedy’s actions and his presidential campaign, Ms. Schlossberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her relatives.
Mr. Kennedy’s bizarre admission comes as his 2024 presidential campaign appears to be in trouble.
After President Joe Biden announced his decision to resign, Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race and polls showed Mr. Kennedy’s approval rating had dropped to single digits.
The scion of America’s most famous political family, Mr. Kennedy has struggled to raise money and slowed his campaign in recent weeks.
The issues coincided with a series of mistakes that fueled speculation that the US politician might quit the race, although he has insisted he will not.
