Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he had abandoned a dead bear cub in Central Park, with the original intention of skinning it for meat.
In a three-minute video from X, Kennedy said he learned of the incident at an unknown date and asked to confirm it when The New Yorker magazine revealed to him. Kennedy said he was driving north of New York City to go hawking with a group when he witnessed a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.
“So I pulled over, picked up the bear and put it in the back of my van. I was going to skin the bear and it was in pretty good condition,” Kennedy said in a video with Roseanne Barr. “I was going to put the meat in the fridge.”
Kennedy said he returned to New York City for dinner with the dead bear still in his car because his schedule was delayed that day, and because dinner was delayed, he said, he didn’t have time to stop at his home in Westchester County before heading to the airport.
He said he came up with the plan after thinking about a series of bicycle accidents that had been happening around the city at the time.
“Obviously I wasn’t drinking, but the people I was drinking with thought this was a great idea, so I said I had an old bike in my car that someone had asked me to get rid of. So I said, ‘Let’s put a bear in Central Park and make it look like it got hit by a bike,'” Kennedy said, as Attorney General Barr and an off-screen character laughed.
“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy said, adding that the move had in turn attracted a lot of media attention.
Kennedy did not say when the incident occurred, but The New Yorker said in a story published Monday that it happened in the fall of 2014. The timing coincides with reports of a dead bear cub found in Central Park in 2014.
The New Yorker reported that President Kennedy was on a falconry trip when he passed a “shaggy brown mound” on the side of a road in upstate New York. After stopping his car and realizing it was the remains of a black bear cub, Kennedy reportedly loaded the dead bear into the back of his car and later showed it to friends. Photographs obtained by The New Yorker show Kennedy holding the dead bear, his fingers in its mouth, and amused.
Kennedy reportedly drove to Manhattan’s Central Park after falconry that day, and the dead bear was discovered the next day by two women walking their dogs in the park, according to the publication.
Neither the magazine nor the Kennedy campaign immediately responded to requests for comment Sunday night.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted in the video, which drew laughter.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation referred NBC News’ request for comment to the NYPD, which did not immediately respond.
Kennedy criticized the news media in a post to X on Monday after the New Yorker article was published. Without mentioning the magazine, the independent presidential candidate wrote that the media highlights “frivolous stories” to disparage certain politicians.
“The press is often called the ‘fourth estate’ because of its emphasis on independence and high purpose,” he writes, “but in recent times they have become eerily and comically aligned, hyping up minor news stories to damage unpopular politicians.”
“Meanwhile, our nation’s parents can’t afford groceries,” he added. “Brothers don’t speak to each other because of partisan loyalties. Small towns are drowning in addiction and depression. And the world is hurtling toward World War III. Let’s hold our media to a higher standard!”
Catherine Koretsky and Jesse Rodriguez assisted.
