RFK Jr. admits putting dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park nearly 10 years ago
The decade-old question about how a dead six-month-old female black bear cub ended up in New York City’s iconic Central Park beneath an old bicycle has been answered. Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. on Sunday confessed that he was behind the incident after a fact-checker from The New Yorker called him to verify the story.
In a video he posted on X, Kennedy said he had come across the bear in the morning when he was going falconing; a woman in a van in front of him hit and killed the bear.
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“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,” Kennedy said. “And you can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear.”
The New York Times, a social media user noted.
“So many questions remain unanswered,” she wrote. “How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?”
Kennedy said that luckily, the story had died off until The New Yorker reported on it and asked him to verify it for an article about him and his campaign in the magazine.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted.
The New Yorker article, published Monday, included a photo of Kennedy with his hand in the bear cub’s mouth, pretending he was being bitten.
“When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, ‘Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,'” the story’s author, Clare Malone, wrote.
A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation told WCBS’ John Doyle that RFK Jr. will not face charges in the 2014 incident, saying the investigation did not uncover sufficient evidence to determine if violations occurred. “The statute of limitation was one year, which has long expired,” the spokesperson said.
Watch WCBS-TV’s 2014 report on the discovery of the bear cub in the video below:
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Aaron Navarro
contributed to this report.
Source: cbsnews.com