RFK Jr.’s Second Wife Mary Kennedy Gave His Diaries to a Friend Before Death, Saw Them as ‘Leverage’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s late second wife, Mary Kennedy, gave a friend his personal diaries before her 2012 death, viewing them as potential “leverage,” according to a new report.

The journals, which span 1999 to 2001, were later passed along to journalist Isabel Vincent, who details their contents in her new biography RJK, Jr.: The Fall and Rise, as reported by People.

“She saw them as some kind of leverage,” Vincent told the outlet.

According to Vincent, a trusted family source delivered the diaries to her in a plastic shopping bag at an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant in 2013, nearly one year after Mary’s death. “I think you’ll be interested in these,” the anonymous source said, per People.

Excerpts from Vincent’s book were released this week. The entries offer a window into RFK Jr.’s personal struggles, including references to sexual encounters, drug use and lingering grief over the 1968 assassination of his father, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

“I knew Daddy was watching me and that he loved me, but I also felt I was disappointing him,” one entry reads, per the report.

The diaries also shed light on the couple’s troubled marriage. According to People, Mary and RFK Jr. — who shared four children — argued over custody, money and his relationship with Cheryl Hines, whom he married in 2014.

Vincent said Mary closely read the entries in an effort to better understand her husband. “In many ways she was trying to reassure herself that she had been married to a chronic philanderer for nearly 20 years,” she said.

According to Vincent, Mary’s struggles with depression and alcohol use were exacerbated by his alleged infidelity.

“He definitely gaslit her and told her that she was crazy and that her accusations about other women were fantasies,” a source told Vincent. “She was innocent and naive, but she drank, which was classic in the sense of being in pain a lot of the time.”

In another excerpt shared by People, RFK Jr. reflected on his own self-destructive tendencies.

“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,” RFK Jr. wrote, per People. “And yet I’m always on the lookout for something I can’t have to wreck it all.”

Mary was found dead in the couple’s Bedford, New York, home on May 16, 2012. She was 52.

RFK Jr., who is now 72, also wrote he was “deeply in love” with Mary in 1993, when he was still legally married to his first wife, Emily Black, despite the pair being estranged.

Meanwhile, last November, RFK Jr.’s wife Hines released a memoir, titled Unscripted. The former Curb Your Enthusiasm actress has been open about her friendships in Hollywood becoming strained after she married RFK Jr.