Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posts video saying he put a young dead bear in Central Park

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he abandoned a young dead bear in Central Park after he initially planned to skin the cub for meat.

Kennedy said in a three-minute video on X that The New Yorker magazine found out about the incident, the date of which is unknown, and asked him for confirmation. Kennedy described driving north of New York City to go falconing with a group when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.

“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear, and it was very good condition," Kennedy said in the video, talking to Roseanne Barr. "And I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”

Kennedy described his schedule that day as running late, prompting him to drive back to New York City for a dinner with the dead bear still in his car. When the dinner ran late, he said, he had no time to stop at his home in Westchester County before he was due to head to the airport.

He described thinking about a series of bicycle accidents that had happened around that time in the city and hatching a plan.

"I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. And I said I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of. I said, 'Let's go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,'" Kennedy said as Barr and a person offscreen laughed.

"We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something," Kennedy said, adding that the move instead garnered massive media attention.

Kennedy did not specify when the incident took place. But the New Yorker indicated that it occurred in the fall of 2014 in a report published Monday. That timing aligns with media coverage of a dead bear cub found in Central Park in 2014.

The New Yorker reported that Kennedy passed by a “furry brown mound” on the side of the road in upstate New York while on his way to a falconry outing. After pulling over and realizing that it was the carcass of a black bear cub, Kennedy reportedly loaded the dead bear into the back of his car and later showed it to his friends. A photo obtained by The New Yorker shows Kennedy holding the dead bear, placing his fingers inside its mouth and appearing amused, with a grimace across his face.

Kennedy reportedly drove to Central Park in Manhattan after the falconry outing that day. The dead bear was then found by two women who were walking their dogs in the park the next day, according to the magazine.

Neither the magazine nor Kennedy’s campaign immediately responded to requests for comment on Sunday evening.

“It’s going to be a bad story,” Kennedy predicted in the video as people laughed.

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation referred NBC News’ request for comment to the New York Police Department, which did not immediately respond.

Kennedy hit at the news media in a Monday post to X after the publication of The New Yorker’s report. Without mentioning the magazine, the independent presidential candidate wrote that the press highlights “trivial stories” to disparage certain political figures.

“The press is often called the ‘fourth estate,’ to emphasize its independence and high purpose,” he wrote. “But these days it is in eerie, almost comical lockstep, amplifying trivial stories to damage disfavored political figures.”

“Meanwhile, parents in our country can’t afford groceries,” he added. “Brothers won’t speak to each other because of partisan loyalties. Small towns sink under addiction and depression. And the world careens toward WW3. Let’s hold our media to a higher standard!”