Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits He Dumped A Dead Bear Cub In Central Park Ten Years Ago

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he dumped the dead body of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago.

A New Yorker story published on Monday suggested that this incident happened in the fall of 2014. The timing aligns with the media coverage surrounding a dead bear cub found in Central Park in 2014.

The magazine reported that Kennedy passed by a “furry brown mound” on the side of the road in upstate New York while on his way to a falconry outing. 

After pulling over and discovering that it was the carcass of a black bear cub, the independent presidential candidate loaded the animal into the back of his car and later on showed it to his friends. 

A photo obtained by the magazine shows him holding the dead bear, placing his fingers inside its mouth and looking amused, with a grimace across his face.

Kennedy drove to Central Park after the falconry outing that day. The candidate drove to Manhattan and, as it got dark, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person knowledgeable about the incident stated that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it seem like an errant cyclist killed the bear. 

Two women found the dead bear while walking their dogs in the park the next day, according to the magazine. This provoked an investigation by the NYPD.

On August 4, the candidate confessed to actress Roseanne Barr in a video posted on X that he dumped the bear cub in Central Park. He mentioned that while he was driving to go to a falconry outing with people, he noticed “a woman in a van in front of [him] hit a bear and killed it.”

“A young bear,” he then noted. “So I pulled over, 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 also stated that he remembered that he “had to go to the airport” and did not want to “leave the bear in the car.”

He mentioned that there had “been a series of bicycle accidents in New York.”

“They had just put in the bike lanes,” he added. “And some people – a couple of people – had gotten killed, and it was every day, and people had been badly injured.” 

“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” Kennedy noted. “And I said – I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of – I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike.'”

“So everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea,'” the candidate recounted. “So we went and did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”

“The next day, it was like – it was on every television station,” Kennedy said to Barr. “It was the front page of every paper. And I turned on the TV, and there was like [a] mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?'”

“And then there were some people in Tyvek suits with gloves on lifting up the bike, and they’re saying they’re gonna take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted,” he recalled. “I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”

“Luckily, the story died down after a while and stayed dead for a decade,” he stated. “The New Yorker somehow found out about it, and they’re just going to 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.”

The story continues a long string of bad publicity for the presidential candidate. In July, Kennedy texted an apology to his family’s former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, who accused him of assaulting her.

In a Vanity Fair article, Cooney asserted that the candidate engaged in inappropriate behavior in the 1990s, like rubbing her leg, reading her diary, asking her to rub lotion on his back, trapping her against the pantry door and groping her on separate occasions.

Reporters verified that the texts came from Kennedy’s cellphone number using TLOxp, which provides public and proprietary data.

The former babysitter said that the text-based apology did not feel sincere.

As of July, Kennedy is struggling to raise money for his presidential campaign.