Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posed with a bloody bear carcass in a 2014 photo, which resurfaced Monday after he claimed that he was the one to dump a dead bear in New York City's Central Park a decade ago.
The photo was featured in The New Yorker's profile on Kennedy, published Monday, and shows the environmental lawyer, then 60, sitting in a trunk with his hand in the mouth of a dead cub's bloody mouth.
The profile, which discusses Kennedy's past, along with his current campaign, includes an anecdote from 2014 about how he was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he spotted the carcass of a black bear on the side of the road and loaded it into his car.
The New Yorker profile, written by Clare Malone, stated Kennedy later drove to Manhattan following the falconry outing, and "as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle."
"A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist," The New Yorker piece read. " The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D."
When Malone asked Kennedy about the incident, he reportedly answered, "Maybe that's where I got my brain worm," in reference to The New York Times’s reporting earlier this year that he once claimed a parasite ate part of his brain.
A day before the New Yorker piece was released, Kennedy posted a video to social media to explain his version of the bear incident before the magazine releases a "bad story" about him.
The video was posted on X Sunday with the text, "It’s going to be a bad story.”
Kennedy said, while writing on X, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one @NewYorker…”
Kennedy, seated in a kitchen in the video, told actress Roseanne Barr, about how he was driving through the Hudson Valley on his way to go falconing with a group of people when he watched a woman hit and kill a young bear.
“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. It was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” noting people could get a bear tag for roadkill in New York.
The bear stayed in his car while the group went hawking, Kennedy said, but the group stayed late and prevented Kennedy from going home before going into New York City for a dinner at Peter Leger Steak House.
Kennedy said the dinner also went late and he did not have time to drop the bear off at his home in Westchester before needing to head to the airport.
“And 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, adding: “At that time — this was a little bit of the redneck in me — there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and some people, a couple of people had gotten killed, and it was every day, and people had been badly injured every day, it was in the press.”
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he continued.
Claiming he had an old bike in his car that someone asked him to get rid of, Kennedy recalled, "“I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in the Central Park and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike.”
The group thought it would be "amusing" and was surprised when it made national headlines the following morning, Kennedy said. He was then “worried” authorities would trace his fingerprints on the bicycle, but said the story eventually died down a while after the incident.
He said it was brought back to the surface when fact checkers from The New Yorker recently contacted him about the allegations ahead of a "big article" on him.
Some of the details of Kennedy’s story appeared to coincide with an October 2014 incident, in which a woman walking her dog noticed a dead cub lying under the bushes besides a bike in Central Park.
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation said the necropsy showed the cause of the bear's death was “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision,” The New York Times reported at the time.
The NYT piece was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, a reporter for The Times at that time, and the daughter of Mr. Kennedy’s first cousin Caroline Kennedy.
Schlossberg on Sunday told The Times, “Like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story.”
Last month, Kennedy slammed Vanity Fair for a separate article that suggested he ate a dog at some point, claiming the animal carcass photographed was a goat.
