Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. probably won’t win the 2024 presidential race, but when it comes to making weird admissions about past run-ins with animals, he continues to set a historic pace. First there was his brain worm. Then there was the dead dog he posed for a photo with but denied eating. Now there’s the caper of Central Park’s dead black bear cub.
In case you don’t remember, back in October 2014, New Yorkers were shocked to learn that a woman walking her dog in Central Park had come upon the body of a fatally traumatized six-month-old bear. Per the New York Times at the time:
The furry black mass lay hidden under a bush near Central Park’s main loop, unnoticed, unmoving and partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. A dog rustling in the brush drew the first eyes to the bush and a sight rarely, if ever, found in modern Manhattan: a baby black bear, dead. A call to 911 followed and soon yellow police tape cordoned off the area near West 69th Street as detectives found themselves facing a mysterious crime scene on a sunny Monday morning. How the animal, a three-foot-long female, got to that spot remained a mystery at day’s end: a cub, probably born this year, somehow separated from her mother and from anything resembling a natural habitat. …
The police described the bear as having had trauma to her body, but it was not immediately clear how she had died. … Nearby, New Yorkers increasingly familiar with wildlife sightings — a coyote in the park, a dolphin off Throgs Neck in the Bronx — offered theories of their own. Some suspected foul play. Others guessed an accident with a car. One man confidently pronounced the bear old enough to have wandered over from Morris County, N.J.
A necropsy later revealed that the bear had likely been hit by a car, but nobody could have possibly guessed the bizarre sequence of events that led to the bear lying there — let alone that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the one responsible.
RFK Jr. has now admitted it was him — via a video recounting the story to Roseanne Barr — in what appears to be an attempt to preempt a bombshell report from the New Yorker.
Here’s what he said happened: While driving off to do some upstate falconing in Goshen, New York, Kennedy saw a woman run over the bear cub with her van. Kennedy stopped his van and collected the fresh roadkill with the intention of skinning and eating it, because “it was in very good condition.” But alas, he didn’t get back home in time to do that, as he had some dinner plans at Peter Luger Steak House down in Brooklyn. Then he had a flight to catch, but still had a dead bear in his van.
So what’s a Kennedy scion to do? He hatched up a “redneck” scheme with his dinner companions to drive to Manhattan and plant the dead bear in Central Park, along with a bicycle Kennedy also happened to have in his van, in what was supposed to look like the aftermath of a fatal bike-on-bear accident. And later he got worried when the dead bear was big local news and amid the subsequent investigation, it appeared as though the bike would be taken to a crime lab so it could be finger-printed.
And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for that damn New Yorker.
There also may be more to this story then what Kennedy says. Watch his bizarre admission and judge for your yourself:
This post has been updated.
