RFK Jr. says he placed a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivers a keynote speech at the FreedomFest Vegas event Friday, July 12, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP, File)

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a social media video on Sunday that he drove a dead bear cub carcass from upstate New York and placed it in New York City’s Central Park 10 years ago, sharing the story in what he said was an effort to combat a forthcoming New Yorker article he predicted will be “a bad story.”

In the video, which was posted to his X account, Kennedy tells actress Roseanne Barr about traveling through New York’s Hudson Valley to go hawking and coming across a “young bear” that had been hit and killed by another driver. He says in the video he decided to put the dead bear in his car.

“I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was gonna skin the bear,” he said. “It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.”

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Kennedy then tells Barr he spent the day hawking before driving to New York City for a dinner — with the bear still in his car. At the end of the dinner, Kennedy said, he had to go to the airport and couldn’t take the bear back to his home. He said he broached to friends the idea of taking the bear to Central Park and making it appear as if a biker had hit it.

“I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy says in the video, prompting laughs from Barr and others in the room not visible in the video. “Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”

Kennedy said the bear’s discovery appeared on “the front page of every paper,” drawing wide media coverage and prompting investigations from law enforcement, which he said “worried” him because he’d left behind fingerprints. Kennedy suggested he was not blamed for the incident at the time.

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“Luckily, the story died down after a while and it stayed dead for a decade. The New Yorker somehow found out about it, and they just — they’re gonna do a big article on me. … So they asked me, the fact checkers,” he said.

Kennedy suggested the upcoming story would portray him in a negative light.

“You know, it’s gonna be a bad story,” he said while laughing.

Some of the details Kennedy describes in the video appear to align with an October 2014 incident in which a dead bear cub was discovered in Central Park, attracting coverage from major news outlets around the country. The woman who discovered the bear told reporters at the time that she found it with its head resting on a bike. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation said shortly after the bear was discovered that it had died after being hit by a car.