Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to putting a dead young bear in Central Park.
Kennedy posted a video about his admission on X, formerly Twitter.
Kennedy, who said he had planned to skin the cub for meat, picked up the bear after he it being hit by a woman in a van.
He posted the video ahead of an expected article by The New Yorker magazine, who found out about the incident and contacted him for confirmation, per NBC News.
The date of which is not known.
“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 very good condition,” Kennedy said to Roseanne Barr. “And I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy, who driving north of New York City to go falconing with a group when he picked up the cub, went out to dinner in New York City while the dead bear still in his car.
The dinner took longer than expected, leaving no time for to drop the cub at his home in Westchester County. He was headed to the airport.
He said he thought of bicycle accidents that happened around that time in the city. A plan developed.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. And I said I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of. I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,'” Kennedy said.
“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy also said there was a lot of media attention after the bear was found.
The New Yorker story has not been published as of Monday.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy said as people with him in the video laughed.
A dead bear cub was found in Central Park in 2014.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation referred NBC News to the New York Police Department when it asked for a comment. The department did not immediately respond.
Neither Kennedy nor the New Yorker responded to requests for a comment.
