Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted in a video posted to his social media Sunday that about a decade ago, he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park to make it look like it got hit by a bicycle.
In the video, in which actor Roseanne Barr also appears, Kennedy tells a story of driving in upstate New York when a woman driving in front of him hit a cub bear and killed it. He said he pulled over and put the bear in the back of his van to eventually skin the bear “because it was in very good condition” and put the meat in his refrigerator.
After he put the bear in his van, he went hawking with friends and he didn’t have time to go to his home in Westchester and put the bear away. Instead, he was due for dinner in the city. The dinner went late and he had to go to the airport, but the bear was still in his car.
“I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said.
The presidential candidate said at the time there had been a series of bicycle accidents in Central Park because of the new bicycle lanes. A few people who were with him, who Kennedy said had been drinking, thought Kennedy’s “redneck” idea to put the bear in Central Park was a good idea, along with an old bike that was also in his car.
“I said let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike.
“So we went and did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”
Kennedy said the next day that the dead bear was on every news station, and according to the news, they were going to have fingerprints on the bike identified. The news eventually died down, and Kennedy was never discovered to be the one who did the deed.
“There were helicopters flying over it, and I was like, oh, my god, what did I do,” Kennedy said as people in the background of the video laughed.
According to an ABC News article from 2014, a dog walker discovered the 3-foot-tall bear, which had signs of trauma.
“The news that a dead black bear cub was found in Central Park is beyond upsetting,” Elizabeth Kaledin, a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy, said in a statement at the time. “Whenever any wildlife is harmed or injured we at the Conservancy are upset and alarmed. Black bears are not native to Central Park and there are no black bears kept at the Central Park Zoo so this is a highly unusual situation.”
In Kennedy’s video, he said the New Yorker is planning to run this story soon and he wanted to get ahead of it.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy said at the end of the video.