Impartial presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media through 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 mentioned a girl had hit and killed the bear along with her automobile when he was driving behind her exterior of 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 an upcoming story in The New Yorker journal.
The Kennedy marketing campaign and the New Yorker didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Seated with rolled-up sleeves at a desk coated with meals, Mr Kennedy tells Ms Barr in the video that he was driving to satisfy a gaggle of individuals to go falconing close to Goshen, New York, 10 years in the past when the bear was killed. He says he pulled over to place the bear in his automobile.
“I used to be going to pores and skin the bear – and it was in excellent 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 accomplished that.
As an alternative, he says he continued to his falconing enterprise, which went late into the night. He says he went on to a dinner reservation he had 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 dwelling,” Mr Kennedy says. “I needed to go to the airport, and the bear was in my automobile, and I did not need to depart the bear in my automobile as a result of that may have been unhealthy.”
That’s when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a sequence of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an previous bicycle in his automobile.
He tells Ms Barr that he had the thought of staging a motorbike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which a number of drunk individuals with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been ingesting.
“So we did that and we thought it could be amusing for whoever discovered it or one thing,” he says. “The following 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 referred to 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 girl strolling her canine within the well-known New York Metropolis park, in accordance with a 2014 story written by the New York Times. It had been positioned underneath some bushes and an deserted bicycle, the story says.
The paper famous, on the time, that the New York Police Division’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad was trying into the bear’s demise, and the New York Division of Environmental Conservation had concluded that the animal had been killed in a “motorcar collision” – not a motorbike accident.
The New York Police Division and Division of Environmental Conservation didn’t reply to requests for remark.
The New York Occasions story notes how puzzling the 2014 incident was to those that adopted the case: “However so many questions stay unanswered: How did the bear find yourself in Central Park? Was there foul play concerned? Did she die within the park, or was she dumped there?”
In a twist, that decade-old newspaper story was coincidentally written by one other member of the well-known Kennedy household – Tatiana Schlossberg, a former New York Occasions journalist who’s the granddaughter of US President John F Kennedy.
Ms Schlossberg didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark about her relative, although many members of the Kennedy household have disavowed Mr Kennedy’s actions and his marketing campaign for president.
Mr Kennedy’s weird confession comes as his 2024 marketing campaign for president seems to be struggling.
With Vice-President Kamala Harris getting into the race after President Joe Biden introduced his determination to step apart, polls point out that Mr Kennedy’s help has dwindled to the only digits.
A scion of America’s most well-known political household, Mr Kennedy has struggled to boost cash and slowed his campaigning in latest weeks.
These points have coincided with a sequence of blunders which have fuelled hypothesis that the US politician may drop out, although he has insisted that he won’t exit the race.
