Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an independent, has confirmed that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park 10 years ago.
In a video posted on his X account on Aug. 4, the 70-year-old presidential candidate recounted the bizarre circumstances leading to a mystery that baffled the city over the past decade.
According to Kennedy, he was driving through New York’s Hudson Valley early one morning in 2014 on a falconry trip with a group of friends when a driver in front of him hit a bear cub, killing it.
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van,” he said. “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 explained that New York state law allows taking home a roadkill bear with “a bear tag.” The finder must notify law enforcement or the state’s environment authority to acquire such a tag.
However, according to Kennedy, he ran out of time to take the bear back to his Westchester County home before having to catch a flight.
“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 that would have been bad,” he said.
That is when, he said, it occurred to him that there had been a series of local bicycle accidents that were making headlines, and he just happened to have an old bicycle in his car. Several of his friends, intoxicated, endorsed his idea of staging a bike accident.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he told Barr. “So we went and did that and thought it would be amusing for whoever found it.”
The bear cub sparked a media frenzy after a dog walker stumbled upon it on the morning of Oct. 6, 2014, at the urban park, home to a zoo which at that time did not include any bears. Weirdly enough, one of the New York Times reporters who covered the puzzling incident was Kennedy’s niece, Tatiana Schlossberg.
According to Schlossberg’s report, law enforcement took the bear to Albany for analysis and determined that it had been hit by a car. A wildlife expert also told the journalist that someone might have killed the bear and taken it to Central Park.
“I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 cop cars,” Kennedy recalled. “There were like helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’”
“I was worried because my [finger]prints were all over that bike,” he added, drawing laughs from the room. “Luckily, the story died after a while.”
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which regulates the disposal of dead wildlife, did not respond to a request for comment.
