Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a video to his Twitter account on Sunday in which he admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in New York City's Central Park a decade ago.
In the video, which was apparently posted before the New Yorker article was published, Kennedy tells Roseanne Barr how he encountered the bear one morning while driving to Goshen, New York, to go falconry. The video, which is more than three minutes long, appears to show Barr and Kennedy discussing the story while eating breakfast in a spacious kitchen.
“A woman in a truck in front of me had hit and killed a bear — a baby bear,” Kennedy recalled. “So I pulled over and picked up the bear and put it in the back of my truck because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in really good shape, and I was going to put the meat in my freezer. And you can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for a bear that’s killed on the road.”
But the falconry day took longer than expected, and instead of returning home to Westchester, Kennedy had to go straight to dinner at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City. He then had to catch a plane after dinner, which was also delayed.
“And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said. “So I thought, you know at the time, this was a little bit of my country. There was a series of bike accidents in New York. They had just put bike lanes in, so there were a few people getting killed and it was happening every day and people getting seriously injured. It was in the press every day.”
Kennedy said he came up with the idea because he had “an old bike in my car that someone asked me to get rid of.”
“I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park and make it look like it got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy said in the video. He insisted he wasn’t drinking at the time, but the people he was with were and thought it was a “great idea.”
“The next day, it was on every TV station. It was on the front page of every newspaper, and I turned on the TV and there was a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 police cars, and there were helicopters flying overhead. And I said, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ And then some guy came on TV in Tyvek suits and gloves and held up the bike and said they were going to take it to Albany to get fingerprinted,” he said. “I was worried because my fingerprints were all over that bike.”
Kennedy noted that “the story went quiet after a while” until The New Yorker recently contacted him to verify details about the bear incident.
diverse I have reached out to representatives of The New Yorker for comment.
Kennedy’s decision to release a video chat with Barr would also raise eyebrows. Barr, an outspoken comedian who starred in the hit sitcom “Roseanne” in the 1980s and ’90s, has been on the entertainment fringes in recent years. In 2018, Barr’s comeback with the ABC revival of “Roseanne” was halted when she made a racist remark on Twitter about former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.
