New Records Reveal Mess RFK Jr. Left When He Dumped a Dead Bear in Central Park

At this point, it is useful to examine what Kennedy said about the incident in his August 2024 video, where he mentions, for some reason, Roseanne Barr.

Says Kennedy: “I was picking up a group of people who were sleeping in Goshen, New York, up in the Hudson Valley. (Goshen is in Orange County, NY, home to a number of bears that Hynes said the child might have been coming in.) “And then a woman in the van in front of me hit the bear and killed it.”

Kennedy says he put the bear in his van with the idea of ​​”dissecting the bear” and “putting the meat in my fridge,” because it was “in pretty good shape.”

“And you can do that in New York State; you can get a bear tag for a road kill,” Kennedy added.

He and his friends had a good time sleeping, Kennedy said, and the day wore on. Eventually, he found himself running behind on a trip “back to town” to eat dinner at the Peter Luger Steak House—presumably the original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, rather than its Long Island location—and decided he didn’t have enough time to leave the bear at his home in Westchester, New York. So the bear came (apparently) to Brooklyn. But when Kennedy’s dinner took too long, he realized he had to go to the airport.

“I wasn’t drinking, but people were drinking with me who thought it was a good idea,” Kennedy said, stressing a second time that he was not breaking any rules that day. “I had an old bicycle in my car that someone had asked me to throw away, and I said, ‘Let’s go put a bear in Central Park, we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bicycle.’ It would be fun, funny for people.” He explains that there has been a “series” of fatal bike accidents during that time—there have been two in recent months—that inspired the idea.

In the video, Kennedy says he was surprised when he woke up the next morning and found out that the story of the dead black bear in Central Park was big news—again, bears don’t live in Central Park outside of its zoo—and it had caused a major law enforcement response. What worried Kennedy the most, he says, was a news report that said the bike was being sent to a laboratory for fingerprinting.

As HellGate summarized shortly after the Kennedy video was posted, “????????????

Despite the new documents WIRED was able to uncover, questions linger about the decisions Kennedy made that day in 2014. Let’s review the timeline: The bear was found in the early hours of Monday, October 6, 2014. If indeed Kennedy dumped the bear the night before, that would have been Sunday, October 5, 2014.

Kennedy says he found the bear in the Hudson Valley area on the road approaching Goshen, New York. A stop in Westchester on the way to Peter Luger would have added about 35 to 70 minutes to the trip. Perhaps, even if he had met friends familiar with his fondness for animal carcasses (his daughter once alleged that he cut up a dead whale with a saw, strapped its head to the top of his minivan, and brought it home, although a subsequent investigation by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his claim was “baseless”), he would have been unacceptably drunk. But why didn’t Kennedy just quit his job of dissecting and butchering this baby bear and placing it in a wooded area somewhere between Goshen and New York City, especially knowing that he was going to fly later? Only one person knows the answer.