Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared a video on social media in which he admits to having dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014. The clip, posted on his X account on Sunday, features him with controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr as he recounts the bizarre circumstances that led to the incident, which puzzled New Yorkers a decade ago.
Mr. Kennedy explained that a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car while he was driving behind her outside the city. He placed the bear in his van with plans to skin the animal and harvest its meat. It seems he shared this anecdote to preempt an upcoming story in The New Yorker magazine.
The Kennedy campaign and The New Yorker did not respond to requests for comment. In the video, seated at a table covered with food and with his sleeves rolled up, Mr. Kennedy tells Ms. Barr that he was driving to meet a group for falconry near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed, prompting him to pull over and put the bear in his vehicle.
“I was going to skin the bear – and it was in very good condition – and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he says. “And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
New York state permits individuals to take bears killed on the roads, but the law requires that a person notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to obtain the necessary tag. Mr. Kennedy does not appear to have followed this procedure.
Instead, he stated that he continued to his falconry outing, which lasted late into the evening. He also mentioned that he had a dinner reservation at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, approximately 75 miles (121 km) south of Goshen.
“At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn’t go home,” Mr Kennedy says. “I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”
That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.
He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.
“So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says. “The next day… it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?'”
He then mentions that a fact-checker from The New Yorker contacted him to inquire whether he was involved in dumping the bear’s body, which seems to have prompted him to release this video.
The bear’s corpse was discovered by a woman walking her dog in Central Park, where bears are an unusual sight, according to a 2014 story by the New York Times. The bear had been placed under some bushes and an abandoned bicycle.
At the time, the paper reported that the New York Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad was looking into the bear’s death, while the New York Department of Environmental Conservation concluded that the animal had died in a “motor vehicle collision,” not a bike accident.
Neither the New York Police Department nor the Department of Environmental Conservation responded to requests for comment. The New York Times article noted how puzzling the 2014 incident was for those following the case: “But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?”
In a twist, that decade-old newspaper story was coincidentally written by another member of the famous Kennedy family—Tatiana Schlossberg, a former New York Times journalist and granddaughter of US President John F. Kennedy.
Ms. Schlossberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her relative, though many members of the Kennedy family have distanced themselves from Mr. Kennedy’s actions and his presidential campaign.
Mr. Kennedy’s bizarre confession comes as his 2024 presidential campaign appears to be struggling. With Vice President Kamala Harris entering the race after President Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside, polls indicate that Mr. Kennedy’s support has dwindled to single digits.
As a scion of America’s most famous political family, Mr. Kennedy has faced challenges in fundraising and has slowed his campaigning in recent weeks. These issues have coincided with a series of blunders, fueling speculation that the US politician might drop out, although he has insisted he will not exit the race.
