New light has been shed on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s struggles with substance abuse during her troubled relationship with JFK Jr. in a bombshell biography.
‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’, by DailyMail.com columnist and author Maureen Callahan, details how Carolyn was a frequent cocaine user.
She started using the drug when she worked as director of publicity for American designer Calvin Klein in the 80s and early 90s.
There she ‘studied’ the models, Callahan writes, trying to understand how they ‘stayed so thin’ and maintained their good looks.
Carolyn was riddled with insecurity, reportedly confessing to to feeling ‘jolie-laide‘ (ugly-pretty), and when she started dating JFK Jr, in 1994, ‘she turned toward her psychical reinvention’.
‘She was only 28 years old but [she] took to erasing her small facial lines with Botox. She plucked her lush, thick eyebrows into wisps, bleached and ironed her hair, and dropped 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 — including in public, famously rowing in New York’s Washington Square Park, where JFK Jr. was pictured ‘shoving’ Carolyn, then trying to ‘yank off her engagement ring with such force that the stone broke.’
As a result, Carolyn began taking ‘anti-depressants on top of the cocaine’, Callahan writes.
The couple died on July 16, 1999, alongside 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 a Kennedy family wedding. Carolyn was 33; Lauren was 34.
‘In the aftermath of [the crash], it was Carolyn’s vanity, her superficiality, her drug use, her all-around “shrewish” behavior that was often blamed for leading [JFK Jr.] to crash his plane into the ocean,’ Callahan writes.
‘Carolyn has only ever been depicted as the drug-addled harridan who made the last days of America’s prince so miserable,’ she 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.
‘Yet the resulting investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found [JFK Jr.] alone responsible for [the crash].’
In 2001, Carolyn mother Ann Freeman reportedly received millions in a settlement from the Kennedy family.