A gruesome photo has emerged of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with his hand in the mouth of a dead bear cub which he later left in New York’s Central Park.
The New Yorker shared the visual representation in a profile story about the independent presidential candidate on Monday — the latest twist to emerge from a already bizarre presidential campaign.
Kennedy attempted to preempt the magazine’s reporting by releasing a video on Sunday of himself talking to comedian Roseanne Barr about the bear incident.
When he spoke to The New Yorker about it, he joked, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” the magazine revealed.
To make the story even stranger, the first reporter to write about the dead bear found in Central Park for The New York Times was none other than Tatiana Schlossberg, Kennedy’s niece.
She told The Times for the newspaper’s reporting on Sunday that she had no idea that a family member was guilty.
On Monday, The New Yorker published a gruesome photo showing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with his hand in the mouth of the dead bear cub he later left in New York’s Central Park.
“When I wrote the story, I, like the police, had no idea who was responsible for this,” Schlossberg said.
Kennedy said in the video that he was hunting with a group of people in the Hudson Valley when he came across the dead bear.
“A woman in the van ahead of me ran over a bear and killed it, a young bear,” he recalled. “So I pulled over, picked the bear up, and put it in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in really good shape, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.
“You can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for a bear that’s been killed on the road,” he said.
The 70-year-old presidential candidate said he then went hunting for drugs with the dead bear in his car.
He said they caught a lot of game and were staying a long time, so instead of going home to Westchester, New York, he had to go straight to New York City for dinner.
But then the dinner took too long and according to Kennedy he had to go to the airport instead of home.
Kennedy (right) posted a video on Sunday in which he tells the story of the dead bear cub to comedian Roseanne Barr (left)
Kennedy said he wasn’t drinking, but others in his party were when they decided to dump the dead bear cub in Central Park. His cousin was the original New York Times reporter on the story
“The bear was in my car and I didn’t want to leave him in the car because that wouldn’t have been good,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said there was “a little bit of a redneck in me” when he explained that there had been a number of bicycle accidents in the city that had left multiple people dead or seriously injured.
Kennedy remembered that it was in the press every day and that he also had an old bicycle in his car that someone had asked him to help get rid of.
“I said, let’s put the bear in Central Park, and let’s make it look like he got hit by a bicycle,” Kennedy said as he and Barr laughed. “So everybody thought that was a great idea.”
Kennedy said he had not been drinking when the decision was made, but others had.
The candidate said in his video that the day after he left the dead bear in the park, it was on all the television channels and in all the newspapers.
“I turned on the TV and there was a mile of yellow tape and 20 police cars. There were helicopters flying over,” Kennedy said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. What have I done?'”
Kennedy said he was concerned because his prints were all over the bike. But Kennedy said the story died after a while and “it stayed dead for a decade.”
He said that somehow the New Yorker had found out and that they were going to do a big article about it.
“It’s going to be a bad article,” Kennedy said.