RFK Jr. posts video admitting to dumping dead bear in NYC's Central Park in 2014

A decade-old mystery surrounding the identity of the person who placed a dead bear cub in New York City's Central Park has been solved, thanks to an admission from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, a third-party candidate for president, posted a bizarre video on social media Sunday of him talking with actress Roseanne Barr in which he admits placing the dead cub in Central Park and staging it to look as if a bicyclist had run over the animal.

In the video, Kennedy said he was on his way to go falconing in the Hudson Valley in New York in 2014 when a van in front of him hit and killed the bear. Kennedy said he picked up the bear and put it in his car with the intention of skinning it and putting its meat in his refrigerator, but he had a dinner back in New York City that ran late and had to travel to the airport right afterward.

Kennedy told Barr he and a group of people he was having dinner with hatched an idea to place the bear in Central Park and have it look as it had been struck by a bike.

"This was the little bit of redneck in me," Kennedy said in the video.

"We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something," Kennedy said. "The next day, it was on every television station, it was the front page of every paper."

Kennedy said police indicated at the time that they were going to take the bicycle to Albany, New York, to get fingerprinted. The bike would have had his prints on it.

"Luckily, the story died down after a while and it stayed dead for a decade," Kennedy said.

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Fact check: No, RFK Jr did not end news conference when asked if he was confused

Why did RFK admit to placing the bear in Central Park?

The video was apparently released to get ahead of a "bad story" by the New Yorker, Kennedy said, adding the outlet had found out about the incident.

Kennedy captioned the video on X, "Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one," and tagged the publication.

In a strange twist of events, a reporter who first covered the story for the New York Times when the bear was found in 2014 was Tatiana Schlossberg, Kennedy's second cousin and the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, the outlet reported.

New York's Department of Environmental Conservation said a necropsy showed that the bear's cause of death was "blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision," Schlossberg had reported.

After the news broke Sunday, Schlossberg told The New York Times that, "Like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RFK Jr. dumped dead bear in Central Park in 2014, candidate admits