Impartial presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media during which he admits that he dumped a lifeless bear cub in New York Metropolis’s Central Park in 2014.
The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, reveals him with controversial US comic Roseanne Barr as he describes weird circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years in the past.
Mr Kennedy stated a lady had hit and killed the bear along with her automobile when he was driving behind her exterior of the town, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat.
It seems he shared the anecdote to get forward of a narrative in The New Yorker journal printed on Monday.
In keeping with the New Yorker , Mr Kennedy was “tickled” by the invention of the bear whereas on a falconry outing in upstate New York. When he found the bear, he loaded it onto the again of his truck.
A picture included within the article reveals Mr Kennedy grimacing together with his hand contained in the lifeless bear’s bloody mouth.
Citing an nameless particular person with data of the incident, the journal reported that Mr Kennedy “thought it will be humorous to make it appear like an errant bicycle owner”.
The account is broadly just like the one offered by Mr Kennedy over the weekend.
Within the video, Mr Kennedy, seated with rolled-up sleeves at a desk coated with meals, tells Ms Barr that he was driving to satisfy a bunch of individuals to go falconing close to Goshen, New York, 10 years in the past when the bear was killed.
“I used to be going to pores and skin the bear – and it was in superb situation – and I used to be going to place the meat in my fridge,” he says. “And you are able to do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
New York state does enable individuals to take bears killed on roads, however the regulation stipulates that an individual has to inform regulation enforcement or the state’s Division of Environmental Conservation to amass such a tag.
Mr Kennedy doesn’t seem to have completed that.
As a substitute, he says he continued to his falconing occasion, which went late into the night, then went on to dinner at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York Metropolis, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen.
“On the finish of the dinner, it was late and I realised I could not go residence,” Mr Kennedy says. “I needed to go to the airport, and the bear was in my automobile, and I did not wish to go away the bear in my automobile as a result of that might have been dangerous.”
That’s when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a collection of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an outdated bicycle in his automobile.
He tells Barr that he had the thought of staging a motorcycle accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which a number of drunk individuals with him endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been consuming.
“So we did that and we thought it will be amusing for whoever discovered it or one thing,” he says.
“The subsequent day… it was on each tv station. It was a entrance web page of each paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop vehicles, there have been helicopters flying, and I used to be like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?'”
He then notes {that a} factchecker from The New Yorker had known as him and requested whether or not he was concerned in dumping the bear’s physique, which seems to have prompted him to launch this video.
The bear’s corpse was found by a lady strolling her canine, based on a 2014 story written by the New York Occasions. It had been positioned underneath some bushes and an deserted bicycle, the story says.
The article stated that the police’s animal cruelty squad was trying into the demise, and that the New York Division of Environmental Conservation had concluded that the animal had been killed in a “motorized vehicle collision” – not a motorcycle accident.
Neither division responded to requests for remark.
The Occasions story was written by one other member of the Kennedy household – Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of the previous US president, John F Kennedy. She didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark about her relative.
Mr Kennedy’s confession comes as his presidential marketing campaign seems to be struggling. His assist has dwindled to single digits in polls since Kamala Harris entered the race for the Democrats.
He has additionally struggled to lift cash and slowed his campaigning in current weeks, although he insists he has no intention of pulling out.