Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr says the 2014 incident that mystified New Yorkers was a prank.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City's Central Park in 2014.
The clip, posted to his X account on Sunday, shows him with controversial US comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago.
Mr Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was driving behind her outside of the city, and he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat.
It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of an upcoming story in The New Yorker magazine.
The Kennedy campaign and the New Yorker did not respond to requests for comment.
Seated with rolled-up sleeves at a table covered with food, Mr Kennedy tells Ms Barr in the video that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed. He says he pulled over to put the bear in his vehicle.
"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," he says. "And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear."
New York state does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law stipulates that a person has to notify law enforcement or the state's Department of Environmental Conservation to acquire such a tag.
Mr Kennedy does not appear to have done that.
Instead, he says he continued to his falconing venture, which went late into the evening. He says he went on to a dinner reservation he had at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York City, about 75 miles (121km) south of Goshen.
"At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realised I couldn't go home," Mr Kennedy says. "I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn't want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad."
That is when, he says, it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car.
He tells Ms Barr that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park, which several drunk people with him heartily endorsed. He emphasises that he had not been drinking.
"So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something," he says. "The next day... it was on every television station. It was a front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying, and I was like, 'Oh my god. What did I do?'"
Donald Trump’s entry into politics marked a shift from traditional political engagement to what can be described as “politainment” — the blending of politics and entertainment. Trump’s background as a reality TV star and his penchant for dramatic, often controversial statements turned political events into spectacles that captured widespread public attention. This shift made politics more accessible and engaging to a broader audience, transforming it into a form of entertainment that people followed with the same fervor as a reality TV show.
Let's say that Trump has discovered that what a certain chunk of the electorate actually wants is a circus. Okay. You place a larger circus on the table.
You know what? The story is fucking hilarious and wild, I fuck with it. This is somehow both the most redneck and silver spoon bougie shit I've ever seen
While driving for a casual falconing trip (bougie), he finds some fresh roadkill and decides he's going to stuff it in his car and take it and carve it up for food (redneck).
He goes late, realizes he's not making it home (both). Has a hilarious thought, also has with the exact random shit in his car to make that reality, acts on it (redneck)
A dead bear found in the middle of NYC with the implication that a bicyclist ran it over is fantastic, holy fuck XD
If you haven’t heard, Trae Crowder & Corey Ryan Forrester, 2 comedians from the WellRed Comedy tour, have a podcast called Puttin On Airs.
They talk specifically about the Venn Diagram that exists for a number a topics, where the overlap between the fancy & trashy experiences of said topics is rather hilarious.
Adam Carolla had a bit like this on Loveline way back. Outdoor showers, multiple multiple old cars, and big family hunting trips were on his list of “rich man, poor man”
(Carolla’s a dick now, but I listened a lot back in the day)
Good chance he’s full of shit and what really happened was more criminal so he had too come up with an even more batshit story to get himself out of it
I've never done coke, but I've been really drunk and I've been around people who are really drunk and really high on coke and this is still a weird as fuck thing to do.
had to set my VPN to isreal before it'd let me watch it. Not available in the US, Canada, or Germany, but good ol' apartheid isreal getting all that sweet sweet John Oliver goodness 🙄
I’m convinced we live in a timeline where the Illuminati is run by clowns and they are giving us the most absurd storylines for season 2024 of Earth AD.
Lemmy cares about the number of newlines between paragraphs. If you want to have a new paragraph, you need to have at least one extra newline between the two paragraphs. Or else, Lemmy will treat it as a single paragraph.
Probably because he helped get it off the road after she hit it. I don't think he's being sexist here, I think he quite likely did encounter a woman who had hit a bear. He apparently has a whole thing for roadkill meat, and is more than happy to make it his problem.