The decade-old question of how a A six-month-old black bear has been found dead in New York’s iconic Central Park. Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. admitted Sunday to instigating the incident after a New Yorker fact-checker called him to verify the story.
In a video posted to X, Kennedy said he encountered the bear in the morning while out hawking; a woman in a pickup truck in front of him hit and killed the bear.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
“So I pulled over, picked up the bear and put it in the back of my truck because I was going to skin it, it was in great condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” Kennedy said. “And you can do that in New York state. You can get a roadkill bear tag.”
But the falconry day lasted longer than expected, and he had to go straight to dinner in town at Peter Luger Steakhouse, he said. The dinner hour was also late, and Kennedy said he realized he had to get to the airport and wouldn’t be able to get home to Westchester until then.
“The bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave it in the car because it would have been terrible,” he said. “So I thought, at the time, I’m kind of a little hillbilly. There had been a series of bike accidents in New York, and they had just put in bike lanes and so a few people were getting killed and it was every day, and people were getting seriously injured every day, it was in the news.”
He said: “I didn’t drink, of course, but people drank with me and thought it was a good idea.”
Kennedy mentioned that in addition to the dead bear, he had “an old bicycle in my car that someone asked me to get rid of.”
“I said, ‘Let’s put the bear in Central Park and pretend it got hit by a bicycle,'” Kennedy recalled. He didn’t expect the media attention the operation would attract.
CBS New York
“The next day it was like it was on every TV channel. It was the front page of every newspaper, and I turned on the TV and there was about a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 police cars, helicopters flying overhead. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ And then there were people on TV and Tyvek suits with gloves on, lifting the bike up and saying they were going to take it to Albany to get fingerprinted,” he said. “And I was worried because my prints were all over the bike.”
In another strange twist, one of the journalists who wrote about the mystery was Kennedy’s niece and John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, who worked for The New York Times, one social media user noted. “So many questions remain unanswered,” she wrote. “How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play? Did she die in the park or was she abandoned there?”
He said that fortunately the story was dead until The New Yorker reported on it and asked him to check it out. The story has not yet been published.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted.
Aaron Navarro contributed to this report.
