The Suicide of Mary Richardson Kennedy

It is extremely rare for a mother of four children to commit suicide. Abandoning and traumatizing children is not in a mother’s DNA.

One imagines that only under the most extreme conditions would Mary Richardson Kennedy, wife of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have hung herself in the barn.

To me, the manner of her death made a statement. When she hung herself she was trying to say something to someone, if not to the world.

Since Mary Kennedy and her husband belong to the liberal aristocracy, the New York Times is already out with a story absolving Robert Kennedy of any and all responsibility in his wife’s death.

According to the crack investigative reporters at the Times, Robert Kennedy feels very, very bad about all of it.

The paper portrays Kennedy as a long-suffering husband, trying valiantly to help his wife overcome her mental illness and feeling that he had no other recourse than to leave her.

The article makes it appear that Robert Kennedy did nothing that might have contributed to his wife’s depression. It says nothing about his philandering.

The Times tells of one occasion when Mary Kennedy refused treatment for her illness. It has nothing to say about the wondrous new treatments for the illness.

The moral of this story is that the New York Times will rush to defend the reputation of any liberal, especially a Kennedy, about as quickly as it will rush to attack the reputation of any conservative.

Of course, clear thinking people no longer rely on the New York Times for news. If they want to find a more complete picture of what was going on in the marriage of these two environmental activists, they turn to the New York Post.

Here is the Post’s story:

Mary Richardson Kennedy was deep in credit-card debt and getting hammered in divorce court when she hanged herself in a barn on her Westchester estate, friends and documents revealed yesterday.

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. slapped the mother of his four children with several restraining orders, trying to get full custody of the kids — all while he publicly replaced her with his actress girlfriend, Cheryl Hines.

“He was kicking her while she’s down, all alone in this house that she built,” a close friend said. “In the end, everything was just too much.”

And debt collectors were breathing down her neck.

American Express filed a civil suit against Mary in Westchester on April 16, an astounding revelation for someone whose husband has access to the Kennedy trust fund.

If your estranged wife was ill, would you cut off all of her financial support? Would you be trying to destroy her in court? Would you try to take away from her everything that she lived for? Remember that she is the mother of your children. What would you do?

Mary Kennedy was being destroyed by Robert Kennedy. She had no resources of her own and must have felt that she could no longer fight.

The Post reports:

Court records show Kennedy relentlessly built a case against Mary in their custody battle.

 Kennedy, 58 — the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — filed temporary restraining orders against Mary that a Westchester judge signed on March 28, April 19 and again last Friday, documents show.

He also filed an order of protection last September and got another judge to hold her in contempt of court later that month.

The two were due back on Aug. 10. A four-day trial scheduled for September could have resulted in her losing custody. Records in the case are sealed.

Mary also feared getting booted from her estate on South Bedford Road in Mount Kisco — a 10,000-square foot, 1920s farmhouse that was fully renovated in 2007 to be a model of “eco-friendly” building.

 Mary, an architect who gave up her career to raise her family, took charge of every detail, one of her friends said.

“She was going to have to leave her home, the home that she built and made completely eco-friendly, and where would she go?” another friend said.

And then there was the public humiliation. Her Kennedy husband did not even bother to be discreet about his new relationship:

Mary also felt publicly embarrassed as Kennedy carried on his high-profile romance with “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Hines, sources said.

“She faced losing her kids, and his relationship with Cheryl Hines was humiliating. At an event last month, he walked the red carpet with Cheryl as a couple and took the kids,” a source said of the Riverkeeper Annual Fisherman’s Ball in late April.

It’s one thing to say that someone was depressed. It’s quite another to say that she might have had some very good reasons to feel depressed.

When your husband takes your eco-friendly home, your children, and your dignity, when he reduces you to nothing, how can you fight back?

The story reminds me of the suicide of Sylvia Plath.

Poetess Plath, a mother of two young children, was abandoned by her husband, poet Ted Hughes, in favor of a woman named Assia Wevill. She stuck her head in an oven and killed herself. At the time of Plath’s suicide Wevill was pregnant with Hughes’ child. Link here.

The Plath suicide has received an enormous amount of attention, because feminists have almost universally blamed it on her philandering husband, Ted Hughes.

They and we know that Plath had long suffered from depression. Yet, as a woman who martyred herself for the feminist cause she has been idolized ever since as a victim of male misogyny.

Now, how many of today’s feminists do you think will come forward to defend Mary Richardson Kennedy? How many of them will see her suicide as a sign of male perfidy?

Don’t hold your breath.