What RFK Jr.'s Wife Mary Kennedy Allegedly Read In His Diaries Before Her Suicide: 'That’s Going To Haunt Him'
A new biography is exploring the tragic final days of Mary Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s second wife, before her 2012 death by suicide.
In RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, investigative reporter Isabel Vincent uses excerpts from Kennedy’s diaries and interviews with close friends to delve into the controversial politician’s youth, the impacts of his father’s assassination, his addiction issues, his marriages, and his rise to political power.
Per People, Vincent was given access to Kennedy’s private diaries that Mary had taken “for insurance” while going through a divorce from the politician before her death.
Kennedy and Mary married in 1994 and went on to welcome four children: Conor, Aidan, Kyra and William. Kennedy also shares two children, Bobby and Kick, from his first marriage to Emily Black. According to Vincent’s biography, which was excerpted in People on April 7, Kennedy was unfaithful throughout their marriage.
“I’ve been given everything that any person could wish for: A beautiful wife and kids and loving family, wealth, education and good health and job I love. And yet I’m always on the lookout for something I can’t have to wreck it all,” Kennedy allegedly wrote in one journal entry. “No matter how much I have, I want more!”
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Mary had her own issues with depression and alcoholism, but friends told Vincent that Kennedy’s infidelity was a source of much distress. “He definitely gaslit her and told her that she was crazy and that her accusations about other women were fantasies,” said a source who was close to Mary. “She was innocent and naive, but she drank, which was classic in the sense of being in pain a lot of the time.”
Per Vincent, Kennedy told Mary he wanted a divorce on Mother’s Day, May 9, 2010. In the following days, Mary had a series of run-ins with the police, including a fight at home while “intoxicated” and a drunk driving arrest.
“Mary did not want a divorce, and she did not want to lose custody of her children. Following her arrests, she attended AA meetings, but most of all, she pored over Kennedy’s diaries,” Vincent writes. “In many ways, she was trying to reassure herself that she had been married to a chronic philanderer for nearly 20 years.”
“Mary was waiting and hoping for Bobby,” a source who spoke to Mary daily during the last year of her life told Vincent. “And Bobby was cruel about her weight, telling her that she had squandered her beauty. He would put his arm around her and criticize her. It was ugly.”
While a bitter divorce battle was still underway, Mary ended her life at the family’s Bedford, New York home on May 16, 2012. Kennedy and Mary’s friend, Shannon White, found her after the family’s housekeeper alerted them that Mary was missing.
According to a friend of Mary’s who spoke to Vincent, Mary was sober at the time of her death and “trying to resist Kennedy’s pressure to end the divorce negotiations in his favor.”
Those close to RFK Jr. say that Mary’s death hit him hard, even though he was already in a relationship with his now-wife, Cheryl Hines, at the time of her passing. “I know Bobby well enough to know that Mary’s suicide is a weight he will carry for the rest of his life,” a source told Vincent. “That’s going to haunt him.”
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