Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. released a shocking video claiming he was behind a mysterious dead bear found in Central Park a decade ago. He said he originally found it on the street and planned to skin it.
Kennedy posted a video on social media on Sunday in which he tells his story to controversial actress and comedian Roseanne Barr and at least one other person off-camera in a kitchen.
“I took a group of people who were falcon hunting in Goshen, New York, up in the Hudson Valley, and I was supposed to meet them there at eight or nine o’clock. I drove up there really early, about seven o’clock,” Kennedy begins.
“A woman in the van ahead of me ran over a bear and killed it, a young bear,” he recalled. “So I pulled over, picked the bear up, and put it in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in really good shape, and I wanted to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
“You can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for a bear that’s been killed on the road,” he said.
But Kennedy’s story in the more than two-minute video was just the beginning.
The 70-year-old presidential candidate said he then went hunting for drugs with the dead bear in his car.
He said they caught a lot of game and were staying a long time, so instead of going home to Westchester, New York, he had to go straight to New York City for dinner.
But then the dinner took too long and according to Kennedy he had to go to the airport instead of home.
“The bear was in my car and I didn’t want to leave him in the car because that wouldn’t have been good,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said that there ‘“A little bit of the redneck in me” when he said there had been a number of bicycle accidents in the city in which several people had been killed or seriously injured.
Kennedy remembered that it was in the press every day and that he also had an old bicycle in his car that someone had asked him to help get rid of.
“I said, let’s put the bear in Central Park, and let’s make it look like he got hit by a bicycle,” Kennedy said as he and Barr laughed. “So everybody thought that was a great idea.”
Kennedy said he had not been drinking when the decision was made, but others had.
In 2014, a dead bear was discovered in Central Park. Investigation revealed that the six-month-old bear had been killed by a vehicle and left in the park.
Kennedy claims in a video that he was behind the dead bear that was found in Central Park ten years ago. The presidential candidate said he grabbed it off the road and wanted to skin it and put the meat in his refrigerator
Kennedy tells the story of the dead bear in the video to actress Roseanne Barr
It seemed that Kennedy was trying to tell the story now because he wanted to get ahead of a New Yorker article. When he posted the video telling the story, he used the caption that the New Yorker tagged:I’m curious to see how you’re going to tackle this.’
DailyMail.com reached out to the Kennedy campaign team for comment.
In October 2014, a mysterious dead bear was discovered in Central Park. It was discovered by a dog walker who then Central Park Conservancy employee who alerted police.
An investigation by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) revealed that the six-month-old bear had been run over and killed by a vehicle. However, it was not possible to determine how the bear ended up in the park, as there are no black bears in the park.
Kennedy said in his video that the day after he left the dead bear in the park, the story was on every television station and in every newspaper.
“I turned on the TV and there was a mile of yellow tape and 20 police cars. There were helicopters flying over,” Kennedy said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. What have I done?’”
Kennedy said he was concerned because his prints were all over the bike. But Kennedy said the story died after a while and “it stayed dead for a decade.”
He said that somehow the New Yorker had found out and that they were going to do a big article about it.
“It’s going to be a bad article,” Kennedy said.
At the time, the DEC was investigating possible violations of the law. If caught, someone could be charged with, among other things, illegal possession and disposing of a bear without a tag.