Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once left a slain bear cub in Central Park because his falconry expedition interfered with his airport arrival time, he revealed in a video released Sunday.
“Looking forward to seeing how you spin this, @NewYorker,” he captioned the three-minute clip in which he paid tribute to Trump-backed comedian Roseanne Barr with the story of a roadkill dinner gone awry. The newspaper is about to publish a profile of the independent presidential hopeful.
It all happened about 10 years ago, he said, describing the unfinished feat in a kitchen as the view switched between him and Barr, and laughter could be heard off camera. He was going to meet friends for a falconry expedition in Goshen, N.Y., when a woman driving a van in front of him “hit a bear and killed it,” he said. “A young bear.”
RFK Jr. set off, without specifying the condition of the woman or her vehicle.
“So I pulled over and picked the bear up and put it in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear, because it was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he told a nodding Barr. “You can do that in New York state, you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”
He then went on to hawk, bear in car, catch a lot of game and have a much better day than the bear, he said. The party ran late, and instead of going home to Westchester, he realized he had to go straight to a dinner at Peter Luger in NYC, apparently trading beef for bear.
Even that party ran late, forcing him to head straight to the airport.
“And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car,” he said.
He blamed “the little redneck in me” and sketched out his plan, which his drunken friends convinced him was a good idea.
“There had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York,” he said, with people seriously injured. “And I said, ‘Look, I have an old bike in my car that someone asked me to get rid of. I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park and make it look like he got hit by a bicycle. So we went and did it, and we thought it would be fun for whoever found it or something.
The next day, he said, every television station and newspaper was leading the mystery story, and it was “like a mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 police cars,” he said, as Barr’s jaw dropped. “There were helicopters flying over it.”