Roseanne Barr wants you to know that it wasn’t her idea to film Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s shocking confession to dumping a bear cub’s corpse in Central Park 10 years ago.
Seemingly in an effort to distance herself from the disturbing tale, Barr took to Twitter/X on Monday to write that the video in which RFK Jr. tells her his massive secret was not something she’d orchestrated. “This was not filmed by me or my team,” she posted, “This was off the cuff after the interview.” She didn’t have any condemnation for Kennedy—nor did she clarify what interview she was referring to—but she was in agreement that it was “a funny story.” Many are not laughing.
RFK Jr. told the tale on camera to Barr in an effort to get ahead of a “bad story” The New Yorker published on Monday about the time he and a group of friends found a dead bear on a road while hunting. Intending to skin the bear and “keep the meat in the fridge,” as he describes in the video, he put the bear’s body in his car.
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After realizing he had an engagement and couldn't go home as he’d thought later in the day, he and his buddies decided (quite inexplicably) that it would be “funny” to put the dead bear’s body on a riding trail in the heavily populated park for someone else to find.
When a woman walking her dog spotted the deceased animal the following day, the “bear mystery,” as New York’s local news called it, became a huge story. Incredibly, it was Kennedy’s cousin, Tatiana Schlossberg, who originally wrote about the mystery for The New York Times in 2014—and has since come out to say she had “no idea who was responsible” when she first covered it.
RFK Jr. described his relief to Barr in the video at not being caught behind the prank. Barr struggled to hide her discomfort at the shocking details during the painfully long story, as her ex-husband Tom Arnold pointed out on X.
Arnold wrote with a reshare of the video clip, “Halfway through this brutally boring story by this complete nut job Roseanne realizes she’s made a terrible mistake.” But when Barr herself took to X, she was defiant: “There is no spin here, just a funny story,” she wrote. “It’s nice to see RFK finally get some press, albeit during an economic crash by the Biden-Harris administration. Great job journos!”
As for RFK Jr., he seems to feel he’s pulled one over on the press by telling the story before the New Yorker could—but it’s hard to believe that hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth made him look any better.
