One of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cousins says she had no idea he was behind the dead bear cub dumped in Central Park in 2014 when she reported on its discovery while working for the New York Times.
Former Times reporter Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of RFK Jr.’s cousin Caroline Kennedy, wrote about the mystery ordeal when the bear was first discovered under a bicycle, as if it had been fatally hit by the wheels, in the park a decade ago.
Schlossberg said over the weekend she only learned her environmentalist cousin was the culprit as the rest of the world did — when the independent candidate for president copped to it Sunday on video posted to X to try to head off a New Yorker magazine expose.
“Like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story,” Schlossberg, who was an intern at the time, said in a statement released by her former employer.
RFK Jr., 70, admitted he came clean over the unseemly saga because he’d gotten wind it would be included in a forthcoming article that he expected to be damaging.
The Kennedy scion revealed in his video that he was heading to a falconry excursion with friends in Goshen, NY, when a woman driving ahead of him hit and killed the young bear with her vehicle.
“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, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” he recalled.
The environmental lawyer said he wanted to obtain a bear tag for the road-kill cub so he could legally carry out his plan — but that the day got away from him.
He said he ended up having to rush to a dinner in Manhattan and eventually just needed to get the bear carcass out of his vehicle.
He said he and his friends, who were fueled by alcohol at this point, concocted the bizarre dumping plan as a prank because bicycle accidents had been getting significant media attention at the time.
Kennedy, who insisted he was not drunk himself, said they thought it would be funny to make it look like the bear was hit by a bike.
“Everybody thought that’s a great idea. So we went and did that and thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy recounted.
“This was the little bit of the redneck in me,” he added.
A media frenzy ensued when two women eventually discovered the cub and alerted authorities.
“I turned on the TV, and there was like a mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 cop cars,” Kennedy said. “There were like helicopters flying over it. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’
“I was worried because my [finger]prints were all over that bike. Luckily, the story died after a while.”
The bear’s carcass was sent to Albany for a necropsy, which determined the bear was likely hit by a vehicle and had not been a victim of animal cruelty.
