RFK Jr. admits to leaving dead bear in Central Park

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy said Sunday that he dumped a dead bear in New York City’s Central Park a decade ago, claiming he wanted to clarify the story before The New Yorker allegedly releases a “bad story” about him.

In a video posted to the social platform X, Kennedy, apparently in a kitchen with actress Roseanne Barr, recounted that he was driving through the Hudson Valley on his way to go falconing with a group of people when he watched a woman hit and kill a young bear.

“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. It was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he said, noting people could get a bear tag for roadkill in New York.

The environmental lawyer said the bear stayed in his car while the group went hawking during the day, but the group stayed late, preventing him from going home before going into New York City for a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House.

He said the dinner also went late, and he did not have time to drop the bear off at his home in Westchester County before needing to head 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,” Kennedy said, adding, “At that time — this was a little bit of the redneck in me — there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and some people, a couple of people had gotten killed, and it was every day, and people had been badly injured every day, it was in the press.”

“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he continued.

Stating he had an old bike in his car someone previously asked him to get rid of, Kennedy said, “I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in the Central Park and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike.'”

The presidential candidate said the group thought it would be “amusing” and was surprised when it made national headlines the next day.

Kennedy was “worried” authorities would trace his fingerprints on the bicycle, but said the story eventually died down a while after the incident. That was until fact checkers from The New Yorker recently contacted him about the allegations about a “big article” on him.

“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy said, writing on X, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one @NewYorker…”

The New Yorker on Monday released a wide-ranging profile on Kennedy, which includes a photo of Kennedy posing with the bloody bear carcass. 

The profile discusses Kennedy’s past, as well as his 2024 presidential campaign, and includes an anecdote about the bear.

Some of the details of Kennedy’s story that he shared Sunday appeared to coincide with an October 2014 incident in which a woman walking her dog noticed a dead cub lying under the bushes beside a bike in Central Park.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation said the necropsy showed the bear’s cause of death was “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision,” The New York Times reported at the time.

Updated Aug. 5 at 1:34 p.m. ET