New light has been shed on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s struggle with substance abuse during her troubled relationship with JFK Jr. in an explosive biography.
‘Don’t ask: The Kennedys and the women they destroyed’by DailyMail.com columnist and author Maureen Callahan, details how Carolyn frequently used cocaine.
She began using the drug while working as an advertising director for American designer Calvin Klein in the 1980s and early 1990s.
There he “studied” the models, Callahan writes, trying to understand how they “stayed so thin” and maintained their good looks.
Carolyn with RFK Jr. at an event in New York City, October 1998.
Carolyn photographed using a pay phone on Martha’s Vineyard in 1997.
Carolyn was plagued with insecurity and reportedly confessed to feeling “jolie laide‘ (ugly-pretty), and when she started dating JFK Jr, in 1994, ‘she turned towards her psychic reinvention.’
‘She was only 28 years old but she started erasing her small facial lines with Botox. ‘She plucked her thick, lush eyebrows, bleached and ironed her hair, and lost 15 pounds with the help of cigarettes and cocaine (to kill her appetite),’ Callahan writes.
Carolyn and JFK Jr. married in 1996, but “almost immediately there were problems,” Callahan says.
They argued regularly, even in public, famously rowing in New York’s Washington Square Park, where JFK Jr. was photographed “pushing” Carolyn and then trying to “tear off her engagement ring so hard that the stone broke.”
As a result, Carolyn began taking “antidepressants in addition to cocaine,” Callahan writes.
The couple died on July 16, 1999, along with Carolyn’s sister Lauren, when JFK Jr. crashed the plane he was piloting them in off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. They were on their way to the Kennedy family wedding. Carolyn was 33 years old; Lauren was 34 years old.
“After (the crash), it was Carolyn’s vanity, her superficiality, her drug use, her ‘grumpy’ behavior that was often blamed for leading (JFK Jr.) to crash his plane into the ocean,” Callahan writes.
“Carolyn has only been portrayed as the drug-addicted witch who made the prince of America’s final days so miserable,” he adds. ‘The implication: if John Jr. hadn’t been so miserable, he wouldn’t have been so distracted; and if he hadn’t been so distracted, he wouldn’t have crashed the plane.
“However, the resulting investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that (JFK Jr.) is solely responsible (for the accident).”
In 2001, Carolyn’s mother, Ann Freeman, allegedly received millions in a settlement from the Kennedy family.