How about a 10 year old question? A six-month-old female black bear cub was found abandoned in New York’s iconic Central Park. The question posed by the old bike has been answered: Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. confessed to being behind the story after a New Yorker fact-checker called him on Sunday to verify the story.
In a video posted to X, Kennedy said he encountered a bear while out hunting in the morning, and that a woman in the van ahead of him beat the bear to death.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
“So I pulled over and picked it up and put it in the back of the van. I was going to skin it and it was in really good shape and I was going to put the meat in the freezer,” Kennedy said. “You can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for a road-killed bear.”
But the hunting day lasted longer than expected, and he had to go straight to dinner at Peter Luger Steakhouse downtown, he recalled. It was late, and Kennedy realized he had to get to the airport and wouldn’t be able to get home to Westchester first, he said.
“And there was a bear in my car, and I didn’t want to have a bear in my car, because that would be bad,” he said. “So I thought, this is my redneck self. There were these bike accidents in New York, and they had just built bike lanes, and people were dying, and it was happening every day, and it was in the news every day that people were getting seriously injured.”
“Of course I didn’t drink, but the people I was drinking with thought it was a good idea,” he said.
In addition to the dead bear cub, Kennedy noted that “there was an old bicycle in the car that someone had asked me to get rid of.”
“I said, let’s put the bear in Central Park and make it look like he got hit by a bicycle,” Kennedy recalled. What he didn’t anticipate was the media attention the stunt would attract.
CBS New York
“The next day, it was like 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 20 police cars and helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ And they had these guys on TV in Tyvek suits with gloves on, lifting the bike and saying they were going to drive down to Albany to get fingerprints,” he said. “And I was worried because my fingerprints were all over the bike.”
In another strange twist, one of the journalists who wrote about the mystery is Tatiana Schlossberg, Kennedy’s niece and John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, who works for the New York Times, a social media user pointed out. “There are still so many unanswered questions,” she wrote. “How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there a conspiracy? Did she die in the park, or was she abandoned there?”
He said that fortunately, the story had disappeared by the time the New Yorker reported it and asked him to verify it. The story has not yet been published.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted.
Aaron Navarro contributed to this report.
