Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On Sunday, the young man admitted to abandoning his dead bear Central park after he first planned to skin the cub for meat.
Kennedy a A three-minute video on X “The New Yorker” magazine learned about the unknown incident and asked for confirmation. Kennedy described driving from upstate New York with a group to go falconry when he saw a woman in a van shoot and kill a young bear.
“So I took the bear and put it in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear and it was in really good shape,” Kennedy said in the video, speaking to Roseanne Barr. “And I would put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy described his schedule that day as a delay, prompting him to return to New York for dinner with the dead bear still in his car. When the lunch ended late, he said he didn’t have time to stop at his Westchester County home before heading to the airport.
He described thinking about a series of bicycle accidents in the city at the time and devising a plan.
“Of course I wasn’t drinking, but people who thought it was a good idea were drinking with me. And I said I had an old bicycle in my car and someone wanted me to get rid of it. I said let’s go. Put the bear in Central Park, and we hit him with a bicycle.” who we’re going to show,” Kennedy said as Barr and an off-screen person laughed.
“We thought it would be fun for anyone who found it or whatever,” Kennedy said, adding that the move instead attracted mass media attention.
A New Yorker story about Kennedy’s role in the incident has yet to be published. Neither the magazine nor Kennedy’s campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
“This is going to be a bad story,” Kennedy said in the video as people laughed.
He did not specify when the incident happened. In 2014, the discovery of a dead bear cub in Central Park generated significant media coverage.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation referred NBC News’ request for comment to the New York Police Department, which did not immediately respond.
Catherine Koretsky contributed.