Roseanne Barr wants everyone to know that she and her team did not film RFK Jr.‘s bizarre anecdote about placing a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park ten years ago, but appreciates the publicity for the increasingly weird Kennedy scion and presidential candidate.
“This was not filmed by me or my team,” Barr writes in a message on X. “This was off the cuff after the interview. There is no spin here – just a funny story. It’s nice to see RFK finally get some press –
Albeit during an economic crash by the Biden Harris administration. Great job journos!”
Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, attempted to get ahead of the dead bear revelations coming in the August 5 The New Yorker issue by posting a video chat with Barr in which he told the story of finding a dead bear cub along a Hudson Valley road and drove the corpse to Central Park as a joke.
In 2014, Kennedy was driving in New York States Hudson Valley when, he says, he saw a van strike and kill a bear cub. “So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in very good condition,” Kennedy told Barr. He also said he was going to eat the bear meat.
After spending the day “hawking,” Kennedy said that instead of going back to his home in Westchester he had to get to a dinner at a Brooklyn steakhouse. “At the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn’t go home, I had to go to the airport,” he said. “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.”
He said that he and his friends at the dinner decided to take the bear to Central Park “and we will make it look like he got hit by a bike.”
Kennedy said he thought people would find the unusual discovery “amusing,” but instead it turned into a media sensation.
But no one found it amusing. New York’s WCBS news anchor Maurice DuBois (recently named a co-anchor of CBS Evening News) described the event as “an apparent case of animal cruelty.” A WCBS reporter interviewed bystanders who call the discovery “horrible,” “disturbing,” “bizarre” and “strange.” (The report, which aired before a necropsy found that the cub had died after being hit by a car, reports that police at the time said the animal had “stab and slash wounds.”) NBC New York called the discovery “alarming and strange.”
The bear story is just the latest in a string of odd anecdotes made by RFK Jr., which include his revelations that a worm in his brain caused fogginess and memory loss in 2010, and his recent denial on NewsNation’s Cuomo that he once ate a dog as alleged in a Vanity Fair article; he said the animal photographed on a spit was in fact a goat, and that the roasting occurred during a river trip in Patagonia).
