Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he abandoned a dead young bear in Central Park after initially planning to skin the cub for meat.
Kennedy said in a three-minute video on that The New Yorker magazine became aware of the incident, the date of which is unknown, and asked him for confirmation. Kennedy described that he was driving north of New York City to practice falconry with a group when he saw a woman in a van run over and kill a young bear.
“So I stopped and 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 really good condition,” Kennedy said in the video, speaking with Roseanne Barr. I was going to put the meat in my fridge.”
Kennedy described his schedule that day as behind schedule, which led him to return to New York for dinner with the dead bear still in his car. When dinner was delayed, he said, he didn’t have time to stop at his home in Westchester County before heading to the airport.
He described coming up with the idea of a series of bicycle accidents that happened at that time in the city and coming up with a plan.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me and thought it was a good idea. And I said I had an old bike in my car that someone asked me to get rid of. put the bear in Central Park and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy said as Barr and an off-screen person laughed.
“We thought it would be fun for whoever found it or something,” Kennedy said, adding that the move attracted a lot of media attention.
The New Yorker story about Kennedy’s role in the incident has not yet been published. Neither the magazine nor the Kennedy campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted in the video as people laughed.
He did not specify when the incident occurred. A dead bear cub was found in Central Park in 2014, generating 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.
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