Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is claiming that he once placed a dead bear in Central Park as a prank.
In a video shared on his social media on Sunday, Kennedy Jr. is shown telling a story to Roseanne Barr about an incident that occurred in 2014. He had noted he was sharing the story because he was contacted by the New Yorker’s fact checkers who informed him that they were doing a story on the event.
The caption to the three-minute video social media reads, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker…”
Kennedy began his story sharing that at the time he was “taking a group of people falconing up in Goshen, New York, up in the Hudson Valley” and while he was driving, a woman in a van in front of him “hit a bear and killed it. 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,” he said. “And it was very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York state — you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
He continued, “And so then we went hawking and I had the bear in my car. And then we had a really good day, and we went late. We were catching a lot of game, and the people really loved it, so we stayed late. And instead of going back to my home in Westchester, I had to go right to the city, because there was a dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House. And at the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn’t go home — I had to go to the airport. And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car, because, well, that would have been bad.”
“So then I thought, you know, at that time — this was the little bit of the redneck in me — There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York, they had just put in the bike lanes,” Kennedy said. “And some people, a couple of people had gotten killed, and it was every day, and people had been badly injured. Every day, it was in the press. And so I thought — I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea.”
He continued, “I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of, and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in the Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike’ — it would be fun, funny for people. So everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea,’ so we went and did that. And we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”
However, Kennedy recalled the next day “it was on every television station” and on the “front page of every paper.”
“And I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying over it and I was like, ‘Oh my God. What did I do?’ And then there were some people on TV in tie-back suits with gloves on, lifting up the bike, and they were saying they were going to take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted.”
Barr, who is shown standing listening to the story, smiled and added “uh oh” before Kennedy continued.
“And I was worried, because my prints were all over that bike,” Kennedy said. “And luckily the story died down after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade. And the New Yorker somehow found out about it and they’re going to do a big article on me, and that’s one of the articles. So they asked me, the fact-checkers. It’s going to be a bad story.”
At the end of the video, Kennedy could be seen laughing with Barr and others in the room.
The bear being found in a Central Park was in fact reported on at the time. In a New York Times article published on Oct. 7, 2014, it was noted that a dead bear cub was found by a woman walking her dog in Central Park and was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. It was also reported that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation had announced that necropsy results showed that the cause of death was “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision.” However, despite it being concluded how the bear was killed, it was a mystery as to how it ended up in Central Park to begin with.
Though no other context was given for the reason for Kennedy’s video, the story follows other claims the independent presidential candidate has made, including that a parasitic worm ate part of his brain as well as sharing some other deemed conspiracy theories.
In a July 2 Vanity Fair article, a 2010 photo was unearthed of Kennedy and an unidentified woman into the barbequed remains of what resembled a dog. According to Vanity Fair, last year Kennedy texted the picture to a friend who was traveling to Korea, recommending a restaurant there that served canine. Vanity Fair also consulted with a veterinarian, who confirmed that the carcass in the picture did indeed appear to be a dog. Vanity Fair also reported that after the story was published, Kennedy said publicly that the picture is of a goat in Patagonia.
