Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s voracious appetite for cocaine – and how she used the drug to drastically lose weight
New light has been shed on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s struggles with substance abuse during her troubled relationship with JFK Jr. in a surprising biography.
‘Don’t Ask: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’by columnist and author Maureen Callahan of DailyMail.com, describes how Carolyn was a frequent cocaine user.
She started using the drug while working as a publicity director for American designer Calvin Klein in the 1980s and early 1990s.
There she “studied” the models, Callahan writes, trying to understand how they “stayed so thin” and looked good.
Carolyn with RFK Jr. at an event in New York City, October 1998.
Carolyn pictured in 1997.
Steeped in insecurity, Carolyn reportedly confessed that she “felt”jolie-laide(ugly-beautiful), and when she started dating JFK Jr in 1994, she “turned to her psychic reinvention.”
‘She was only 28 years old, but [she] went to erase her tiny facial lines with Botox. She plucked her luscious, thick eyebrows into wisps, bleached and straightened her hair and lost 15 pounds with the help of cigarettes and cocaine. [to kill her appetite]’, Callahan writes. ‘The lively hipster with dirty blonde hair was no more. In her place appeared a slim, white-blonde ice queen.’
Carolyn and JFK Jr. married in 1996, but “almost immediately there were problems,” Callahan says.
The couple died on July 16, 1999, along with Carolyn’s sister Lauren, when JFK Jr. the plane he was piloting in crashed 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 and her all-around “shrewish” behavior that was often blamed for leading [JFK Jr.] to crash his plane into the ocean,” Callahan wrote.
“Carolyn has only ever been portrayed as the drug-addicted harridan who made the American prince’s last days so miserable,” she adds. ‘The implication: if John Jr. had not been so miserable, he would not have been so distracted; and if he hadn’t been so distracted, he wouldn’t have crashed the plane.
“Yet the resulting National Transportation Safety Board investigation shows [JFK Jr.] solely responsible for [the crash].’
In 2001, Carolyn mother Ann Freeman reportedly received millions in a settlement from the Kennedy family.