What happened with RFK Jr. and the bear cub in Central Park? (2024)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is raising eyebrows after saying in a video he once left a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park.

In a video posted Aug. 4 on Kennedy’s officialX account, the 70-year-old independent presidential candidate tells comedian Roseanne Barr that he and his friends left the dead cub’s corpse in the park because they thought it would be “amusing.”

Read on to learn about Kennedy said about the dead bear he left in Central Park, and why he publicly shared the news. NBC News reached out to Kennedy’s campaign on Aug. 4 and did not hear back.

How did Robert F. Kennedy end up with a bear cub?

In his video, Kennedy says he was in Goshen, New York, about an hour and a half outside of New York, to take a group of people falconing.

Early that day, he watched a van in front of him strike and kill a baby bear while he was driving near

“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 very good condition,” Kennedy says in the video. “I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”

With the bear in the back of his car, Kennedy went hawking. “We had a really good day so we stayed late,” he says in the video.

As a result, was running behind schedule and, instead of stopping at his house in Westchester, had to go directly to dinner at Peter Luger’s Steakhouse in Brooklyn.

How did the bear end up in Central Park?

When the dinner also ran late, the younger Kennedy says he decided not to return to his home. Instead, he planned to drive to an airport to catch a pre-scheduled flight.

“I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he tells Barr.

Kennedy then schemed up a plan to discard the cub’s body after remembering “a series of bicycle accidents” that had happened in New York City at that time.

“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. 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,’” Kennedy says, prompting Barr and others in the room, not seen on camera, to laugh.

“Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea!’” he says.

“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” he adds.

Kennedy says he was worried when officials launched an investigation about the crime scene, “because my prints were all over that bike.”

The discovery of the dead cub in Central Park was reported in the media in 2014

NBC affiliateWNBC in New Yorkreported in October 2014 that a dead black bear cub was found in Central Park.

Other New York-based media, includingThe New York Times,also reported about the incident. The Times specified that the cub, whose mouth was splattered with blood, was a three-foot-long female, likely born the same year.

“This is a highly unusual situation,” Elizabeth Kaledin, a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy, told The Times. “It’s awful.”

Kennedy decide to go public with the bear story after getting a call from the New Yorker

Kennedy, who married former “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Cheryl Hines earlier that year in 2014, then tells Barr that the incident initially received media attention but “the story died after a while” and “stayed dead for a decade.”

That is, until The New Yorker “found out about it” and decided to report about it, he says. The publication, says Kennedy, had fact checkers reach out to him asking him to confirm he was the person who left the dead cub in the park.

“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicts in the video as people laugh.

Kennedy captioned his video, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker.”

A day later, The New Yorker shared detailsin an Aug. 5 news storyabout how Kennedy and his friends dumped a black bear cub’s “carcass” in Central Park in 2014.

The publication also published a photo of Kennedy jokingly placing his hand in the dead cub’s mouth and grimacing.

According to The New Yorker report, the dead cub was discovered the next day in the park by two women walking their dogs. The New York Police Department subsequently launched an investigation.

Kennedy responded to the article on X.

“The press is often called the ‘fourth estate,’ to emphasize its independence and high purpose,” he wrote. “But these days it is in eerie, almost comical lockstep, amplifying trivial stories to damage disfavored political figures.”

“Meanwhile, parents in our country can’t afford groceries,” he added. “Brothers won’t speak to each other because of partisan loyalties. Small towns sink under addiction and depression. And the world careens toward WW3. Let’s hold our media to a higher standard!”