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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says He Dumped Dead Bear in Central Park

Published

5 months ago

August 5, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a video on his X/Twitter account on Sunday, in which he admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade ago.

In the video, which was seemingly released to get ahead of a forthcoming New Yorker article, Kennedy recounted to Roseanne Barr how he had come across the bear in the morning as he was driving to Goshen, N.Y., to go falconing. The video, which runs a little over 3 minutes, appears to show Barr and Kennedy discussing the story over breakfast in a spacious kitchen.

“A woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it — a young bear,” Kennedy recalled. “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. And you can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear.”

But the falconing day went longer than anticipated, and instead of returning to his home in Westchester, Kennedy had to go straight to a dinner at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City. He then had to catch a flight after the dinner, which also went late.

“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,” he said. “So, then I thought, you know at that time, this was the little bit of the redneck in me. There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and so a couple of people were getting killed and it was every day and people had been badly injured. Every day it was in the press.”

Kennedy said he had an idea that involved 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 said in the video. He insisted that he hadn’t been drinking at the time, but the people he was with were drinking and thought it was a “great idea.”

“The next day, it was, like, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ And then they were, there was some people on TV 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 said. “And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”

Kennedy noted that “the story died down after a while” until the New Yorker recently reached out to him to verify details about the bear incident.

Variety has reached out to representatives from the New Yorker for comment.

Kennedy’s decision to release a video conversation with Barr will also raise eyebrows. Barr, the outspoken blue-collar comedian who starred in the hit 1980s and ’90s sitcom “Roseanne,” has been on the fringe of entertainment in recent years. In 2018, Barr’s comeback with a revival of “Roseanne” on ABC was cut short when she made a racist statement on Twitter about former Obama White House advisor Valerie Jarrett.