RFK, Jr., sex, suicide, and Borderline Personality Disorder

New York Post

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. grappled with what he called his biggest defect — “my lust demons” — while keeping a scorecard of more than two dozen conquests, according to his secret diary.

The thick, red journal was found in their home by his wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who, distraught over their impending divorce and Kennedy’s serial philandering, committed suicide last year.

... 

The couple had known each other since Richardson was 14 and a boarding-school roommate of Kennedy’s younger sister, Kerry. They married in 1994, weeks after Kennedy divorced his first wife, Emily Black, with whom he had two children.

Richardson was pregnant with their first child, Conor, when they married. They moved into the 1920 clapboard house in Westchester County."

Gotta love the Kennedy brand of Catholicism: divorce, premarital sex, and extramartial affairs.

Apparently, RFK, Jr.'s deceased wife Mary Richardson Kennedy, had the same diagnosis as Marilyn Monroe, who had affairs with both his father and his uncle:


The Daily Beast

Indeed, according to documents seen exclusively by The Daily Beast that delineated Richardson’s mental-health issues from early adolescence through her first year of marriage, Richardson, throughout her life, was waging a cyclical battle with her own mental health—ongoing feelings of depression, self-loathing, and low self-esteem. In fact, the surprise is not that she died so young, but that she willed herself to stay alive so long. Early on, unable to handle or explain her feelings, she simply quit talking for 10 days. At 22, her anorexia, diagnosed as a teenager, landed her in Boston’s McLean Hospital for three months. “During the bad episodes,” recalls a close friend, “Mary always talked about suicide.”

At 25, an initial suicide attempt, a plastic bag over her head, was thwarted when she panicked as she began running out of air; a year later, in August 1986, there was another failed attempt when Richardson vomited up the 200 barbiturates that she had swallowed. Afterward, she continued binging and purging, accompanied by regular use of alcohol and drugs, prescription and otherwise, for three years, until 1989 when, through AA, she managed to stop everything until 2005.

Richardson—and many who knew her—never bought her 2009 diagnosis of borderline personality disorder by specialist in the field Dr. John Gunderson. But Kennedy felt Richardson exhibited classic signs of the personality disorder that produces intense and unstable interpersonal relationships; anorexia; chronic feelings of emptiness; fear of abandonment; idealization and devaluation of herself and others; intense, inappropriate anger, most often aimed at Kennedy, he has claimed; a labile personality, capable of instantaneously “switching” from rage to euphoria and recurrent suicidal gestures or threats. (Ten percent of borderlines kill themselves.)

“In two seconds flat,” says Hoving, “Mary could flip from anger and rage into white-picket-fence mode, put on her Martha Stewart face and convince anybody, including her own family, that she was in control of her faculties, environment, and personal matters. It was always jarring.”