This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A week ago,

we were getting ready at the New Yorker to publish a piece by staff writer

Claire Malone and I started getting text messages that something kind of odd was

going on. A bizarre twist to a nearly decade old mystery in Central Park

where a bear cub was discovered dead. Independent presidential candidate

Robert Kennedy Jr. has now confessed to putting it there.

In a video that was apparently intended to blunt the impact of a negative news story that

had not yet come out.

He tells Rosam Barr that he was responsible for a dead bear cub that turned up in Central Park in 2014.

Luckily, the story died after a while and it stayed dead for a decade and the New Yorker somehow found out about it.

Claire Malone joins us now. Claire, you just published a profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But Kennedy tried to get ahead of your story the day before publication by explaining on video via social media a certain

incident that you covered in your reporting.

Then he shared the video which appears to be shot in a kitchen.

He's in a kitchen and he is telling it to Roseanne Barr.

And what is Roseanne Barr doing in that kitchen? My best guess, being a close

Robert F. Kennedy, junior watcher these past few months, is that he and Roseanne were taping a podcast sometime in the last week or so.

Okay. And that also coincided with the time which we were fact-checking my profile.

Okay, so he's gotten a call from your fact-checkers telling him what?

Well, he's gotten a call for me because, you know, in the reporting process, once you've

reported something out, then you have to

go to the individual for comment so I called Bobby Kennedy the other week and sort of

...