Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent presidential candidate and nephew of President John F Kennedy, has said he abandoned a young dead bear in Central Park.
Kennedy, 70, posted a three-minute video on X, in which he described the incident to actress and comedian Roseanne Barr.
He also said The New Yorker magazine had found out about the incident, the date of which is unknown, and asked him for confirmation.
Kennedy described driving north of New York City to go falconing when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.
“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,” the politician said.
“I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy said he was running late, which meant he drove back to New York City for a dinner with the dead bear in his car.
When the dinner ran late, he said, he had no time to stop at his home in Westchester County before he was due to head to the airport.
He and his friends hatched a plan inspired by a series of bicycle accidents that had happened around that time in the city.
“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 as Barr and a person offscreen laughed.
“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something,” Kennedy said, adding that the move instead garnered significant media attention.
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The New Yorker has not published a story about Kennedy’s role in the incident, Sky’s US partner network NBC News reports.
Neither the magazine nor Kennedy’s campaign responded to NBC News’ request for comment.
“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy said in the video as people laughed.
A dead bear cub was found in Central Park in 2014, leading to significant media coverage.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation referred NBC News’ request for comment to the New York Police Department, which did not immediately respond.