Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he dumped a dead bear cub near Central Park a decade ago. Reports of a similar incident from 2014 found no culprit.
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Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. once claimed that parasitic worms may have eaten his brain — and yet something even weirder regarding his past has come to light.
In a video posted to X on Sunday, Kennedy said that ten years ago, he picked up a dead bear cub from the road with the intention of skinning it and storing the meat in his fridge.
In New York, hunters are allowed to take one bear a year as long as it is appropriately reported to authorities and tagged — though residents are not allowed to intentionally kill a bear cub.
"I was driving up really early, and a woman in a van in front of me hit the bear and killed it, a young bear. So I pulled over, and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van," Kennedy said to actress Roseanne Barr in a video on X.
Kennedy later realized, after driving around with the bear in his trunk for hours, that he had to go to the airport.
"I didn't want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad," he said in the video.
He then said his friends, who had been drinking, encouraged him to abandon the carcass in Central Park in New York. Kennedy said he was sober but decided to go along with the plan.
To dispose of the carcass, Kennedy said he intentionally left the dead bear on the side of the road to make it appear like a car had hit the bear. Kennedy said he had also left a bicycle near the bear.
"We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said that he believed the story would go away, but instead, it became national news after a woman walking her dog discovered the animal. "Luckily, the story died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade," he said.
A 2014 New York Times story appears to detail the incident though the exact timeline is unclear. Per the Times, a woman "noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle."
Ironically, the author of the Times story, Tatiana Schlossberg, is John F. Kennedy's granddaughter. This makes Schlossberg and Kennedy, JFK's nephew, cousins.
Kennedy said he chose to reveal that he and his friends were behind the dumping to get ahead of a New Yorker story detailing the incident.
"The New Yorker somehow found out about it, and they're gonna do a big article on me, and that's one of the articles. So they asked me, the fact-checkers. It's gonna be a bad story," Kennedy said before he and Barr burst into laughter.
This isn't Kennedy's first controversy related to a dead animal carcass. The independent presidential candidate recently fought off claims that he barbecued and ate a dog.
A representative for Kennedy's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
