A presidential candidate planted a bear's corpse in Central Park for fun.

Former US presidential candidate and American politician Robert Kennedy Jr. admitted that it was he who planted the carcass of a bear in New York's Central Park ten years ago. He and his friends thought the prank would be funny, reports Guardian.

Earlier it became known that the New Yorker magazine would publish an article about this incident in the near future. 70-year-old Kennedy, anticipating the scandal, told in an interview how it all happened.

In a video post on X, Kennedy speaks with actress Roseanne Barr.

He said he was hunting in the Hudson Valley in Goshen, New York, in 2014. There he came across a young bearwho was hit by a car. While driving there in the early morning, a woman driving in front of him killed a bear with her car.

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"I stopped and put bear in the trunk of his van. At first I planned to skin him. It was in very good condition. I was going to skin him and fill my refrigerator with bear meat,” Kennedy said.

Strange idea

Some of his buddies thought it would be a good idea to dump a dead bear in Central Park and make it look like he had been hit by a bicycle. Kennedy Jr. decided to put the old bicycle in the car next to the deceased animal.

“Everyone agreed it was a great idea. And so they did. We thought it would be funny for whoever found it,” Kennedy admitted in an interview.

“The next day it was on every TV channel,” Kennedy Barr said. “I thought: oh my God, what have I done? I was very worried then, because my prints were all over the bike... Fortunately, the story subsided over time.”

Scandal in the media and panic among citizens

In 2014, a scandal quickly erupted in the media after a woman discovered a dead bear under the bushes, partially covered by a bicycle.

That's when Florence Slatkin, who lives near the park, said her friend's terrier spotted something near a bicycle lying on the ground.

“At first we thought it was a bag of clothes or maybe a dead dog,” she said.

But then, as they got closer, they realized it was a very young bear “with its mouth wide open and scratches on its side.”

Arriving police found injuries on the bear's body. It was unclear how he died. This prompted an investigation that was never revealed until Kennedy's August 4 interview. Local residents were puzzled by the sudden appearance of a dead bear in Central Park, and many were horrified.

Kennedy and Barr laughed when he said the New Yorker had learned of his role in the event.

“This will be a bad story,” he concluded.