Robert F Kennedy Jr has revealed how he was involved in a viral 2014 incident involving a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park.
In an effort to give his side of the story before a New Yorker story is published about the incident, the 2024 presidential election nominee recalled how he was the person who placed the dead bear cub in the famous park and made it look like it was a bicycle accident.
While speaking to actress and comedian Roseanne Barr, Robert F Kennedy shared how he had been in the Hudson Valley in 2014 hawking when he came across the dead bear cub. He said a woman in a van in front of him was the one who hit and killed the animal.
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van,” Kennedy explained. “Because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in very good condition.”
Robert F Kennedy pointed out he was going to put the meat in his refrigerator. He left the dead animal in his vehicle while he spent the day hawking. Instead of going back to his home in Westchester, he went to New York City to have dinner with some friends.
“At the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn’t go home,” he noted. “I had to go to the airport. And the bear was in my car.”
He then said, “I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car, because that would have been bad.”
Robert F Kennedy and His Friends Make an Odd Plan to Leave the Bear Cub in Central Park
Robert F Kennedy and his friends at the dinner then hatched a plan to take the bear to Central Park. They would “make it look like he got hit by a bike.”
He had an old bike in his car that somebody asked him to get rid of. He was planning to use it for the plan.
“So, then I thought you know at that time this was the little bit of the redneck me,” he said. “There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York they had just put in the bike lanes and so a couple of people were getting killed and it was every day and people badly injured every day it was in the press.”
The politician said he and his friends thought whoever discovered bear cub would find it “amusing.” However, the incident quickly went viral in a strange, unexpected way for him.
“The next day it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper,” Kennedy said. “I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ And then they were, there was some people on TV and Tyvek suits with gloves on lifting up the bike and they’re saying they’re gonna take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted. And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”
The Presidential Nominee Says the New Yorker Story is Going to Be ‘Bad’
To add to the very odd story, Kennedy’s niece and John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, had written about the discovery of the dead bear cub. This was when she worked at the New York Times.
Robert F Kennedy then added that “thankfully” the story died down after a while. However, he pointed out that the story in The New Yorker isn’t going to make him look good.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predictably added.