Kennedy shares story of ‘amusing’ prank after the New Yorker found he was behind the headline-grabbing mystery
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an Independent candidate for the White House, said he planted a dead black bear in Central Park as a prank a decade ago.
Kennedy says in a video posted on X that he was sharing the story after the New Yorker found he was behind the “amusing” prank, which made national headlines in 2014.
In the video, which has been viewed more than 14 million times, Kennedy sits in a dining room chair while recounting the tale to a tea-sipping Roseanne Barr. Kennedy starts by explaining that he was driving north of New York City to go falconing when a woman in a van in front of him struck and killed a young bear.
“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,” he says. “It was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy says he was falconing with a group late into the day and had to attend a dinner at Peter Luger Steak house that night. That also ran later than expected. He then had a flight to catch and couldn’t get home in time to skin and quarter the bear he was planning to eat.
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Kennedy, who was 60 at the time, said as he was convinced by the people he was with, some of whom had been drinking, that it was a “good idea” to dump the carcass in Central Park with an old bicycle he had in his car. The bizarre prank was inspired by recent headlines on bike crashes at the park and was made to look as if a bicyclist had struck and killed the bear, he explained.
“There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and a couple of people had gotten killed, and it was every day and people had been badly injured,” he said.
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“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy noted. However, the caper seemed to have gone off the rails, with the bear drawing the attention of more than a cub reporter or two.
“The next day it was, like, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper, and I turned on the TV and there was, like, a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it,” Kennedy claimed. “And I was like, Oh my God, what did I do? And then there was some people on TV and TYVEK suits with gloves on lifting up the bike, and they’re saying they’re gonna take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted, and I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”
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A New York Times article from Oct. 7, 2014, reported that the bear was a six-month-old female that had been found by a woman walking her dog “lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle.” (The author of the article, coincidentally, is an apparent granddaughter of John F. Kennedy.)
RFK said that “the story died down after a while.” That’s until the New Yorker found out about the incident and reached out to him for comment.
Kennedy, who claims to have a “little bit of the redneck in me,” said he expects a “bad story” to come out about him. In the X video about the bear incident, he tagged the magazine, writing: “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one.”
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