Robert Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, said in a video posted to X today that he was the person who placed a dead bear cub in Central Park, making it look like it was involved in an accident with a bicycle.
He relayed the unusual story apparently in an effort to get ahead of a New Yorker piece on the incident.
In the video, Kennedy is speaking to Roseanne Barr, in a kitchen area.
Kennedy said that he had been in the Hudson Valley area, early one morning, when a woman in a van in front of him hit a bear and killed it.
Roseanne Barr and Robert Kennedy
“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 said he was going to put the meat in his refrigerator.
After spending the day hawking, Kennedy said that instead of going back to his home in Westchester he had to get to a dinner in New York City.
“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.”
They thought that whoever found the bear would find it amusing, but instead it created a bit of a media sensation. “The next day it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper,” Kennedy said.
In 2014, The New York Times reported on the discovery of a dead bear cub, “The initial details of the case were clear: A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. The Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad began looking into the bear’s death, and the cub was taken to Albany for analysis by the conservation department’s wildlife health unit.” Authorities determined that the bear had been hit by a car.
The Times added, “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 the story, experts surmised that it was the latter, commenting that it would be highly unusual for a bear to travel through the city to the park.
That said, the story had remained a public mystery until Kennedy’s revelation.
His campaign has had its share of other unusual revelations. In May, The New York Times reported that Kennedy had said in a deposition that a worm got into his brain and ate a portion of it. Kennedy told the Times that he had recovered from the memory loss and fogginess caused by the parasite.
