The truth comes out…a decade later.
The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted he was responsible for staging the scene of a dead cub in New York City's Central Park after he found the bear on the road, and said in the video he saw a woman hit the animal with her van.
RFK Jr. admitted he only came out with the truth now, a decade later, because a New Yorker reporter was preparing to publish an article on his involvement.
In a video, which he posted on X, Kennedy recalled he found the dead cub while out falconing one morning.
“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 in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” Kennedy claimed. “And you can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear.”
However, Kennedy then revealed he continued falconing longer than expected before going to a dinner which ended late. The candidate said he realized he had to catch a flight and would not be able to make it home to drop off the dead bear, prompting him to make a quick decision.
“And the bear was in my car, and I didn't want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he continued. “So, then I thought you know at that time this was the little bit of the redneck me. There'd been a series of bicycle accidents in New York they had just put in the bike lanes and so a couple of people were getting killed and it was every day and people badly injured every day it was in the press.”
Kennedy also had an old bike in his car and thought it would be a good idea to plan the bike next to the bear's body.
“I said let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like it got hit by a bike,” he added. However, the hailstorm of media coverage that soon followed after the bear was discovered was not something Kennedy expected.
He concluded “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. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?' And then they were, 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.”
The story got plenty of coverage from CNN.
