Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park in 2014.
The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, shows him with US comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago.
Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her outside of the city, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal for its meat.
He shared the anecdote as the New Yorker magazine published a story about the incident on Monday.
According to the New Yorker story, published on Monday morning, Mr Kennedy was “tickled” by the discovery of the bear while heading to a falconry outing in the rural Hudson River Valley north of New York City.
An image included in the article shows Mr Kennedy grimacing with his hand inside the dead bear’s bloody mouth. He had loaded the bear into the back of his car.
Citing an anonymous person with knowledge of Mr Kennedy’s disposal of the bear’s corpse in Central Park, the magazine reported that Mr Kennedy “thought it would be funny to make it look like an errant cyclist” had run into the animal.
The account is broadly similar to the one provided by Mr Kennedy on Sunday.
In the video, Mr Kennedy, seated with rolled-up sleeves at a table, tells Ms Barr that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed.
“I was going to skin the bear – and it was in very good condition – and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he says. “And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
New York state does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law requires a person to notify law enforcement or the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to acquire such a tag.
Mr Kennedy does not appear to have done that.
Instead, he says he continued to his falconing event, which went late into the evening, then went on to dinner at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen.
“At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn’t go home,” Mr Kennedy says. “I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”
That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.
He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him thought was a good idea. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.
“So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he says.
“The next day… it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. What did I do?'”
He then notes that a factchecker from the New Yorker had called him and asked whether he was involved in dumping the bear’s body, which appears to have prompted him to release this video.
The bear’s corpse was discovered by a woman walking her dog, according to a 2014 story written by the New York Times. It had been placed under some bushes and an abandoned bicycle, the story says.
The article said that the police’s animal cruelty squad was looking into the death, and that the New York DEC had concluded that the animal had been killed in a “motor vehicle collision” – not a bike accident.
In a statement, the DEC told the BBC that it had investigated the Central Park bear cub incident and determined the bear had died from a high-speed collision. The department said it closed the investigation that year due to a “lack of sufficient evidence to determine if violations occurred”. It added that charges cannot be brought for incidents that occurred more than one year ago.
The Times story was written by another member of the Kennedy family – Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former US President John F Kennedy. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her relative.
Mr Kennedy’s confession comes as his presidential campaign appears to be struggling. His support has dwindled to single digits in polls since Kamala Harris entered the race for the Democrats.
His fundraising has floundered, which has forced him to slow his campaigning in recent weeks.
He maintains that he has no intention of ending his presidential bid.
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