Drama and intrigue have followed around the Kennedy family for many decades, but this has to be one of the strangest stories one of them has ever been involved with.
RFK Jr. posted video to Twitter/X Sunday showing him telling comedienne Roseanne Barr that he knew who was responsible for the dead bear that was found in New York City’s Central Park in 2014—himself. Really.
This is what he says happened:
‘A woman in the van in front of me hit a bear and killed it, a young bear,’ he recalled. ‘So 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, and it was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.
‘You can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear,’ he said.
Ok, already an interesting if odd story. But it gets weirder. Much weirder:
The 70-year-old presidential candidate said he then proceeded to go hawking [a term for falconry] with the dead bear in his car.
He said they were catching a lot of game and stayed late, so instead of heading home to Westchester, NY he had to go straight to New York City for a dinner.
But then the dinner also went late, and according to Kennedy, he needed to go to the airport instead of his home.
‘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.
Kennedy said there was ‘a little bit of the redneck in me’ when he explained there had been a series of bicycle accidents in the city and multiple people had gotten killed or badly injured.
Kennedy recalled it was in the press every day and that he also had an old bike in his car someone asked him to get rid of.
‘I said let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike,’ Kennedy said as he and Barr laughed. ‘So everybody thought that’s a great idea.’
Kennedy said he had not been drinking when the decision was made but others had been.
Maybe you weren’t drinking, RFK, but were you doing something else? Because these are some odd decisions.
Watch:
Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker… pic.twitter.com/G13taEGzba
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 4, 2024
He reportedly referenced the New Yorker in the above tweet because they found out about the story and are writing it up, and RFK thinks “It’s going to be a bad article.” It would appear that he’s trying to get ahead of the negative press by telling Barr this wild tale.
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The discovery of the deceased bear caused quite the stir in the Big Apple at the time, but the mystery remained unsolved:
Kennedy said in his video that the next day after leaving the dead bear in the park, it was on every television station and in every paper.
I turned on the TV and it was like, mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it,’ Kennedy said. ‘I was like “oh my god. What did I do?”‘
Kennedy said he was worried because his prints were all over the bike. But Kennedy said the story died after a while and ‘it stayed dead for a decade.’
But wait—there’s more! Guess who wrote up the story in 2014? You can’t make this stuff up.
The dead bear cub that scandalized the nation in 2014 was planted in Central Park by none other than presidential candidate @RobertKennedyJr. Bonus: The @nytimes article was written by his niece. Hey Tatiana, did you have any clue it was your crazy uncle Bobby? pic.twitter.com/ST1JKBM3Tc
— Chris DeRose | Hotels, Housing, History (@chrisderose) August 4, 2024
Now we know why there was a dead bear in Central Park. Unknown: how this will affect his presidential campaign. My guess is—it won’t help.
How NYC local news covered the dead bear RFK Jr put into Central Park ten years ago 😬👀 https://t.co/J25gDeLQ1Q pic.twitter.com/nJio51Li3R
— Luther Lowe (@lutherlowe) August 4, 2024