Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he abandoned a young dead bear in Central Park after he initially planned to skin the cub for meat.
Kennedy said in a three-minute video on X that The New Yorker magazine found out about the incident, the date of which is unknown, and asked him for confirmation. Kennedy described driving north of New York City to go falconing with a group when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.
“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 very good condition,” Kennedy said in the video, talking to Roseanne Barr. “And I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy described his schedule that day as running late, prompting him to drive back to New York City for a dinner with the dead bear still in his car. When the dinner ran late, he said, he had no time to stop at his home in Westchester County before he was due to head to the airport.
He described thinking about a series of bicycle accidents that had happened around that time in the city and hatching a plan.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. And I said I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of. I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,'” Kennedy said as Barr and a person offscreen laughed.
“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” Kennedy said, adding that the move instead garnered massive media attention.
The New Yorker story about Kennedy’s role in the incident has not yet been published. Neither the magazine nor Kennedy’s campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted in the video as people laughed.
He did not specify when the incident took place. A dead bear cub was found in Central Park in 2014, leading to significant media coverage.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation referred NBC News’ request for comment to the New York Police Department, which did not immediately respond.
