RFK Jr. admits putting dead bear cub in New York City's Central Park nearly 10 years ago

The decade-old question about how a dead 6-month-old female black bear cub ended up in New York City's iconic Central Park beneath an old bicycle has been answered. Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. on Sunday confessed that he was behind the incident after a fact-checker from The New Yorker called him to verify the story.

In a video he posted on X, Kennedy said he had come across the bear in the morning when he was going falconing; a woman in a van in front of him hit and killed the 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 in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator," Kennedy said. "And you can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear."

But the falconing day went longer than expected, and he had to go straight to a dinner in the city at Peter Luger Steakhouse, he recounted. That, too, ran late, and Kennedy said he realized he had to go to the airport and would not be able to go home to Westchester first. 

"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 said. "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."

He said, "I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea." 

Kennedy mentioned that in addition to the dead bear cub, he 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 it got hit by a bike," Kennedy recalled. What he did not expect was the media attention the stunt would attract.

"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," he said. "And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike." 

In another odd twist, one of the reporters who wrote about the mystery at the time was Kennedy's niece and John F. Kennedy's granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, who was working for The New York Times, a social media user noted. 

"So many questions remain unanswered," she wrote. "How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?"

Kennedy said that luckily, the story had died off until The New Yorker reported on it and asked him to verify it for an article about him and his campaign in the magazine.

"It's going to be a bad story," Kennedy predicted. 

The New Yorker article, published Monday, included a photo of Kennedy with his hand in the bear cub's mouth, pretending he was being bitten.

"When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, 'Maybe that's where I got my brain worm,'" the story's author, Clare Malone, wrote.

A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation told WCBS' John Doyle that RFK Jr. will not face charges in the 2014 incident, saying the investigation did not uncover sufficient evidence to determine if violations occurred. "The statute of limitation was one year, which has long expired," the spokesperson said.

Watch WCBS-TV's 2014 report on the discovery of the bear cub in the video below:

Aaron Navarro contributed to this report.

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• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
• New York City
• RFK Jr.
• Central Park