Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admits to dumping dead bear in NYC's Central Park

Aug. 5 (UPI) -- In a preemptive attempt to undercut the potential political cost of a seemingly forthcoming magazine article, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the long-shot presidential candidate who is running as an independent, admitted to dumping the carcass of a bear cub in New York's Central Park in 2014 as a joke.

The discovery of the bear in Manhattan's iconic park made headlines in the fall of 2014. It was found in the bushes under a bicycle. Though it was determined to have died by being hit by a car, how it found its way into the center of the Big Apple has remained a mystery for the last decade.

That is until Kennedy published a bizarre nearly 3 1/2-minute video to X on Sunday in which he tells actress Roseanne Barr in a large white kitchen the story of how he came in possession of the bear. He said a fact checker at The New Yorker had asked him about it for a yet-to-be-published article.

Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker ... pic.twitter.com/G13taEGzba — Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 4, 2024

In the video, he tells Barr that he was en route to Goshen, N.Y., to meet a group of people to go falconing with when a car in front of him hit and killed the bear.

Kennedy said he pulled over and put it in the back of his van with intentions to later skin and butcher it as it was "in very good condition."

After falconing, which is a form of hunting with the use of falcons, he returned to Manhattan to attend a dinner that went late.

Having to go to the airport afterward and not wanting to leave the bear carcass in his vehicle, he decided to abandon it in the park with a bicycle that had also been in his truck to make it seem as if it had been hit and killed in a bicycle accident.

"There'd been a series of bicycle accidents in New York -- they had just put in the bike lanes -- and some people, a couple of people had gotten killed. And it was every day and people were badly injured," he said.

He said he had not been drinking but those he was with had been and they thought the joke was a "great idea."

"So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something. The next day, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper," he said. And I was like, 'Oh my God! What did I do?'"

Barr chuckles in reaction to the story. As the video ends, Kennedy proclaims that the piece for The New York Times is going to be "a bad story."