In a bizarre video posted on his social media feeds, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. admitted to dumping the body of a bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014—an incident that caused a police animal cruelty investigation but was never solved.
In the video, Kennedy tells comedian Roseanne Barr the incident began when he was driving to meet people to go falconing in Goshen, New York. As he was driving through the Hudson Valley, he saw a woman in front of him hit a “young bear” with her van.
“I pulled over, I picked up the bear and put it in the back of my van. Because 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. You can do that in New York—you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
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In reports from 2014, NYPD investigators described the animal as a “black bear cub” that was only about three feet long.
Kennedy said he continued with his day—falconing in the Hudson Valley—before going straight to dinner at Peter Luger Steak House (he did not specify if he had dinner at the pricey steakhouse’s historic Williamsburg, Brooklyn location or the institution’s Great Neck, Long Island outpost). He forgot about the bear until later that night—after he realized he needed to board a flight and couldn’t drop the bear off at home.
Instead, Kennedy devised a strange scheme to dump the animal in Central Park.
“There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York, they had just put in the bike lanes,” Kennedy said. “I saw 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. So I thought—I wasn’t drinking of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea… I had an old bike in my car that somebody had 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.”
The blue-blooded scion of one of America’s most prominent political dynasties claimed the plan was inspired by “the little bit of the redneck in me.”
Laughing, Kennedy said his companions thought it was a “great idea,” and thought it would be “amusing.”
Meanwhile, a dog walker in Central Park discovered the bear’s corpse near West 69th Street on Monday, October 6, 2014. The dog walker, identified as 79-year-old Florence Slatkin by the New York Daily News, called the discovery “shocking.”
The NYPD opened an investigation and shipped the bear cub’s body to a lab in Albany, which determined it died from “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision,” according to the New York Times. A bear researcher interviewed by the paper accurately guessed that someone likely brought the cub’s body from outside the city.
The story was quickly picked up by other major papers and television stations in the tri-state area. Kennedy said he saw these reports the next day and thought “Oh my God, what did I do?”
It is not immediately clear why Kennedy decided to come clean about the bear cub almost a decade after the news broke.
The independent presidential candidate said he was getting ahead of the story after he was contacted by New Yorker fact checkers—who questioned him about the bear.
“It’s gonna be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted.
