Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shocked people this year with a story about a parasitic worm eating away part of his brain. Now he’s back with another strange tale: the one about a dead bear cub being abandoned in New York’s Central Park.
The independent US presidential candidate, conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccination activist made the revelation in a three-minute video posted on social media on Sunday. He appeared to have tried to make the revelation ahead of a New Yorker magazine story that mentioned a bizarre tale of street-killed and stolen animals a decade ago.
Kennedy told the full story in a video shot during a post-dinner conversation with sitcom actress Roseanne Barr, among others:
Kennedy said he and his friends were on a falcon hunting trip in New York state in 2014 when a van ahead of them struck a six-month-old black bear, killing it.
The scion of America’s most prominent political family, wanting to preserve the corpse for meat, placed it in the back of his vehicle.
“And you can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for a bear you kill on the road,” Kennedy, 70, says in a heavy voice.
But the hawk hunting trip started late, so they couldn’t bring the remains back to their home in Westchester County.
That evening, at a dinner in the Big Apple, Kennedy realized he would have to head straight to the airport, where he was scheduled to catch a flight.
“The bear was in my car and I didn’t want to leave it in the car because that would have been dangerous,” he said.
Kennedy and his companions, after deliberation, took the body to the iconic Central Park and left it under an old bicycle that was kept in Kennedy’s car.
Kennedy said the plan was to make it look like a cyclist had hit the animal, a confession that made people laugh in the video.
“I wasn’t drinking, but there were some people drinking with me who thought it was a good idea,” he says.
The son of the late Robert F. Kennedy added, “Then I thought, you know, I had a little bit of a ‘redneck’ (anarchist) streak in me at that time.”
When the animal’s carcass was finally found, it became big news.
“And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'” Kennedy says, adding: “I was worried because my footprints were all over that bike.”
He said the story went under the rug for a decade until a fact-checker from The New Yorker called to confirm it for a feature on Kennedy. That article has not yet been published.
“That’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted with a laugh.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
