He had a bear-y unique experience.
Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared to admit to being one of the culprits who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago after abandoning a plan to skin it. Seemingly trying to preempt a forthcoming story from the New Yorker magazine, Kennedy, 70, bizarrely recounted in a video posted to social media how some of his buddies were drinking and thought it would be a good idea to dump the dead bear in the park and “make it look like he got hit by a bike.”
The Kennedy scion insisted that he wasn’t drinking when he opted to put an “old bike in his car” that someone asked him to throw away next to the deceased animal. At the time, there had been a spate of local biking accidents making headlines.
“Everybody thought that’s a great idea. So we went and did that and thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy recounted in a video posted on X that featured sitcom actress Roseanne Barr. A media frenzy quickly ensued in 2014 after a woman discovered the dead bear under some bushes, concealed in part by a bike. The bear was described in reports as a cub, though Kennedy simply called it “a young bear.”
“I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 cop cars. There were like helicopters flying over it. And I was like ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’” he said. “I was worried because my [finger]prints were all over that bike. Luckily, the story died after a while.”
Locals were puzzled by the sudden appearance of the dead bear at the time, and many people were horrified.
Kennedy claimed in the video that he stumbled upon the dead bear while trekking through New York state for a falconry trip in Goshen, New York. During his ride up there in the wee hours of the morning, Kennedy claims that a woman in front of him hit a bear with her vehicle and killed it.
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him 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,” he recalled. The environmental lawyer explained that he planned to obtain a bear tag for a roadkill bear and put the meat in his refrigerator later. But the falconry trip ran late.
He then had to dash over to New York City instead of heading back to his home in Westchester County due to a dinner he needed to attend. At that point, he realized he needed to go to the airport but had the dead bear in his car. All of this prompted his decision to dump the dead bear in Central Park.
“This was the little bit of the redneck in me,” Kennedy quipped.
Kennedy predicted that the forthcoming reporting about his handling of the dead bear would be negative. Kennedy is averaging 5.5% in presidential polls compared to former President Donald Trump’s 44.6% and Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44.8% support in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of a five-way national race. For context, the RCP aggregate had him at 8.7%, President Biden at 39.2%, and Trump at 43.4%.
