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Washington:
Robert F Kennedy Jr. disgusted people this year with a story about a parasitic worm eating part of his brain. Now he’s back with another doozy: leaving a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park.
The independent US presidential candidate, conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist made the revelation in a three-minute video posted to social media on Sunday, reportedly in an attempt to gain notoriety ahead of a New Yorker magazine article detailing the strange story of runaway, sneaky animals from a decade ago.
In the video, which was recorded during what appeared to be an after-dinner conversation with sitcom actress Roseanne Barr, among others, Kennedy tells the story:
He and his friends were falcon hunting in upstate New York in 2014, Kennedy said, when a van in front of him struck and killed a 6-month-old black bear.
The scion of America's most prominent political family, eager to save the corpse for meat, placed it in the back of his own car.
“And you can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for a bear that’s been hit by a car,” Kennedy, 70, says in a hoarse voice.
But the falconry expedition ran late, leaving him unable to bring the remains to his Westchester County home.
The same thing happened at a dinner he attended that evening in the Big Apple, and Kennedy realized he had to go straight to the airport for a flight he had to catch.
“The bear was in my car and I didn't want to leave him in the car because that wouldn't have been good,” he said.
After brainstorming, Kennedy and his team took the carcass to the city's famous Central Park and left it under an old bicycle Kennedy had in his car.
Kennedy said the intention was to make it look like a cyclist had killed the animal, a confession that drew laughter from the people in the video.
“I wasn't drinking, of course, but there were people drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he says.
“Then I thought, you know, that was the little bit of redneck in me,” adds the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy.
When the animal's body was finally found, it became big news.
“Then I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'” Kennedy said, adding, “I was worried because my fingerprints were all over the bike.”
He said the story sat dormant for a decade until a New Yorker fact-checker called to verify it for an article about Kennedy. The piece has not yet been published.
“It's going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicts with a laugh.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published via a syndicated feed.)
