A US candidate for president has admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in a New York park after being pictured posing with his hand in its mouth.
Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr shared a video of himself explaining how he left the animal carcass in Central Park a decade ago, that for years remained a mystery.
In the 2014 clip he posted to X (formerly Twitter), Kennedy told controversial comedian Rosanne Barr that he was driving to a falconry outing near Goshen when he came across the dead bear.
‘A woman in the van in front of me hit a bear and killed it, a young bear,’ he said while sitting at a table as Barr stood and listened.
‘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.’
Kennedy continued that in New York ‘you can get a bear tag for roadkill bear’.
However, he went on to explain that the hawking went long and that he did not have time to go home to Westchester to drop off the carcass, and instead went straight to New York City for dinner, and afterward had to go to the airport.
‘The bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,’ he said.
Kennedy then chuckled and mentioned the ‘little bit of the redneck of me’ that got an idea around deadly bicycle accidents and injuries linked to nearly installed bike lanes at the time.
He said he was not drinking but that others with him were and thought he came up with ‘a good idea’ around an old bike that was in his car that he was supposed to dispose of for someone.
‘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. ‘So everybody thought that’s a great idea.’
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He said the dead bear was all over the news the next day and that he worried because his fingerprints were on the bike, but that it remained a mystery to the public for a decade.
Kennedy posted the clip on Sunday, a day before The New Yorker published a profile on him that included a photo of him sitting at the edge of his vehicle trunk and faking a face of pain as he stuffed his fingers in the deceased cub’s mouth. The bear had a visible open wound on its side.
The candidate told the magazine when asked about the picture: ‘Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.’
In another weird twist, Kennedy’s cousin, Tatiana Schlossberg, was the first journalist to report on the bear cub – and told The New York Times that ‘like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story’.
It is not the only weird incident to emerge from Kennedy’s past recently.
A month ago, Vanity Fair published a 2010 photo of Kennedy holding an animal carcass. The magazine reported that Kennedy told someone who was traveling to Asia that ‘that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog’. Kennedy denied the account and said the carcass belonged to a goat.
Kennedy, who is the nephew of the US’s 35th president John F Kennedy, left the Democratic Party at the end of last year and announced his bid for the White House as an independent.
A Data for Progress poll released in late July showed that ex-President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris were tied at 49% support among likely voters in battleground states, but that Trump had a 1 percentage point lead over Harris when Kennedy and four other candidates were included. With 4% support, Kennedy was the leading candidate after Trump and Harris in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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