Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. is claiming responsibility for a decade-old mystery about how a dead black bear cub was found in Central Park.
On Sunday, Kennedy shocked the internet when he posted a 3-minute video to X, formerly Twitter, taking credit for abandoning the young bear's body back in Oct. 2014.
The dead bear was been discovered in the brush by a passers-by, leading to continued local and national coverage of how it had come to be in the world-renowned park and how it had died.
In that video, Kennedy tells Roseanne Barr his version of the story about that October day when he was driving up to the Hudson Valley to meet a group of people and came across the bear. The cub, he said, had been hit and killed by a woman driving in front of him.
"So, 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. And it was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York State, you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear," Kennedy explained.
Kennedy said he put the bear inside his car and continued onto his plans for the day: falconing. But the day went long and he had to get back to Manhattan for a dinner at Peter Luger Steakhouse, he said. The dinner also ran late, pushing up against a flight he had to take.
"And the bear was in car, and I didn't want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad," he went on.
U.S. & World
"So then I thought, you know, at that time, this was the little bit of the redneck in me. 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."
Kennedy stressed that he wasn't drinking, but "people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea." He said he also got the idea to dump an old bike he was trying to get rid of.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. >Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
"I said, 'Let's put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like it got hit by a bike.'"
The next day, he said, "it was on the front page of every paper." Media outlets, including NBC New York, covered the story at the time.
#centralpark conservancy worker finds dead baby bear near CPW details at 5 #NBC4NY pic.twitter.com/GVx5KjOi5s
— Andrew Siff (@andrewsiff4NY) October 6, 2014
The media frenzy had Kennedy worried, he said, but eventually the story died down. Until recently.
"The New Yorker somehow found out about it and they just, they're gonna do a big article on me and that's one of the articles so they asked me the fact checkers you know, it's gonna be a bad story," said at the end of the video.
That piece from the New Yorker has not yet been published.
