Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014.
The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, shows him with controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago.
Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her outside of the city, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat.
It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of a story in The New Yorker magazine published on Monday.
According to the New Yorker , Mr Kennedy was “tickled” by the discovery of the bear while on a falconry outing in upstate New York. When he discovered the bear, he loaded it onto the back of his truck.
An image included in the article shows Mr Kennedy grimacing with his hand inside the dead bear’s bloody mouth.
Citing an anonymous person with knowledge of the incident, the magazine reported that Mr Kennedy “thought it would be funny to make it look like an errant cyclist”.
The account is broadly similar to the one provided by Mr Kennedy over the weekend.
In the video, Mr Kennedy, seated with rolled-up sleeves at a table covered with food, tells Ms Barr that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed.
“I was going to skin the bear – and it was in very good condition – and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he says. “And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
New York state does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law stipulates that a person has to notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to acquire such a tag.
Mr Kennedy does not appear to have done that.
Instead, he says he continued to his falconing venture, which went late into the evening. He says he went on to a dinner reservation he had at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen.
“At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn’t go home,” Mr Kennedy says. “I had to go to the airport, 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.”
That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.
He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.
“So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says. “The next day… it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?'”
He then notes that a factchecker from The New Yorker had called him and asked whether he was involved in dumping the bear’s body, which appears to have prompted him to release this video.
The bear’s corpse was discovered by a woman walking her dog in the famous New York City park where bears are an unusual sight, according to a 2014 story written by the New York Times. It had been placed under some bushes and an abandoned bicycle, the story says.
The paper noted, at the time, that the New York Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad was looking into the bear’s death, and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation had concluded that the animal had been killed in a “motor vehicle collision” – not a bike accident.
The New York Police Department and Department of Environmental Conservation did not respond to requests for comment.
The New York Times story notes how puzzling the 2014 incident was to those who followed the case: “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 a twist, that decade-old newspaper story was coincidentally written by another member of the famous Kennedy family – Tatiana Schlossberg, a former New York Times journalist who is the granddaughter of US President John F Kennedy.
Ms Schlossberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her relative, though many members of the Kennedy family have disavowed Mr Kennedy’s actions and his campaign for president.
Mr Kennedy’s bizarre confession comes as his 2024 campaign for president appears to be struggling.
With Vice-President Kamala Harris entering the race after President Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside, polls indicate that Mr Kennedy’s support has dwindled to the single digits.
A scion of America’s most famous political family, Mr Kennedy has struggled to raise money and slowed his campaigning in recent weeks.
Those issues have coincided with a series of blunders that have fuelled speculation that the US politician might drop out, though he has insisted that he will not exit the race.
