Claim:
In August 2024, U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to dumping a bear carcass in New York's Central Park a decade earlier, staging the scene to look like a bike accident.
Rating:
True ( About this rating? )
On Aug. 4, 2024, in an apparent effort to get ahead of a New Yorker profile set to be published the following day, independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a video on his social media platforms in which he recounted a story about ditching a bear cub carcass in New York's Central Park in 2014 and staging the scene to look like a bike accident:
Though the story may sound outlandish, Kennedy did make such an admission. In Kennedy's telling, the incident began on a falconry trip upstate, when a car in front of him fatally hit a bear. Seeing that the animal's meat was in fine condition, Kennedy decided to take the carcass with him to freeze and later eat. After a long dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, however, he realized he had a plane to catch and couldn't get the bear carcass back to his freezer.
Not wanting to leave the dead bear in his car for an extended period of time, and aware of a recent spate of New York City bike accidents, Kennedy decided to put the animal's remains in Central Park alongside an abandoned bike. "I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of it," he said to Roseanne Barr in the video . "I said, 'Let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like [it] got hit by a bike.'"
"Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, [New Yorker]" Kennedy posted on X alongside the video. The August 2024 New Yorker profile did indeed include the bear story, alongside a picture of the carcass:
One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub.
Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear's bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. …
After the outing, Kennedy … got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist.
The presence of any bear — dead or alive — in central Manhattan would be noteworthy, as such an occurrence would not happen naturally . Indeed, when the bear was found the next day its discovery became the source of a widely reported mystery covered in print and television news . The story was even covered, unwittingly , by a Kennedy relative working, at the time, as an intern at The New York Times.
The bike ruse did not hold up to scrutiny. As the Times' Tatiana Schlossberg — granddaughter of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy — reported in October 2014, experts quickly determined that the bear had been struck by a car:
The mystery of the bear cub found dead on Monday in Central Park is one step closer to being solved: It was revealed on Tuesday that she died after being hit by a car.
The state's Department of Environmental Conservation announced that the results of a necropsy showed that the cause of death was "blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision."
Dr. Lana Ciarniello, a bear expert … guessed that someone killed the bear and took it to Central Park. It was highly unlikely that a bear cub would travel across the concrete jungle.
The story eventually died down without resolution. That is, Kennedy said , until a fact-checker from the New Yorker asked him about the story in 2024.
Because the video of Kennedy admitting to the bear incident is undoctored and originated with his own social media accounts, and because the event he admitted to has a historical record, the claim is "True."
Sources:
Fitzsimmons, Emma G. "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits He Left a Dead Bear in Central Park." The New York Times, 4 Aug. 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/us/politics/robert-f-kennedy-jr-bear-central-park.html .
Malone, Clare. "What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?" The New Yorker, 5 Aug. 2024. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/robert-f-kennedy-jr-profile-presidential-campaign .
Schlossberg, Tatiana. "Bear Found in Central Park Was Killed by a Car, Officials Say." The New York Times, 7 Oct. 2014. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/nyregion/bear-cub-found-dead-in-central-park-was-hit-by-a-car-investigators-say.html .
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