Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services, kept private diaries that chronicled what he called an insatiable appetite for extramarital temptation, journals his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, later found, hid, and pored over before she took her own life in 2012. Those entries are now at the center of a forthcoming biography set to publish April 14.
The book, titled "RFK, Jr.: The Fall and Rise," was written by New York Post investigative reporter Isabel Vincent. It draws on diary entries Kennedy wrote in 2001, which Vincent obtained roughly a year after Richardson died at the couple's estate in Bedford, Westchester County. The New York Post reported on the diary excerpts and sourced accounts that paint a picture of a marriage marked by infidelity, emotional distance, and a slow-motion collapse that ended in tragedy.
Richardson and Kennedy married in 1994. She was the mother of four of his six children. Their marriage lasted eighteen years, at least on paper, though the diary entries suggest the relationship fractured long before Kennedy told his wife on Mother's Day 2010 that he wanted a divorce.
In the 2001 entries, Kennedy wrote with a striking degree of self-awareness about his own behavior, and then kept doing what he described. One passage lays out the contradiction in plain terms:
"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. And yet I'm always on the lookout for something I can't have to wreck it all."
Another entry, shorter and blunter, captures the same theme: "No matter how much I have, I want more!"
Kennedy also described the deterioration of his home life. He wrote that "our bed is an unfriendly place" and complained that Richardson "hates it when I go to bed with her, and will never have sex at night. She rarely speaks to me of anything but scheduling."
What the diaries do not include, at least in the excerpts made public, is any acknowledgment that his own conduct may have driven the distance he catalogued. The entries read more like a man building a case for himself than examining his own role in the wreckage.
The biography goes beyond the diary entries. Vincent interviewed people close to Richardson who described a woman consumed by her husband's alleged infidelity and increasingly unable to cope. A source close to Richardson told Vincent that Kennedy denied her suspicions and turned them back on her:
"He definitely gaslit her and told her that she was crazy and that her accusations about other women were fantasies."
That same source described Richardson as "innocent and naive" and said she drank, "which was classic in the sense of being in pain a lot of the time."
An insider who treated Richardson for depression recalled her devotion to her husband and the Kennedy name. "She was just 200% invested in being his wife and living the Kennedy lifestyle," the insider said. Another source put it more starkly: "The notion that she would stop being a Kennedy was scary to her."
Those accounts, all from unnamed sources, cannot be independently verified from the material available. But they align with the timeline. After Kennedy told Richardson on Mother's Day 2010 that he wanted to file for divorce, she was arrested twice for drunken driving. In the days that followed the divorce announcement, she reportedly pored over his diaries, entries she had taken and hidden as what Vincent describes as "insurance."
Richardson hanged herself at the couple's Bedford estate in May 2012. The divorce was never finalized. Kennedy went on to marry actress Cheryl Hines in 2014.
Kennedy's private journals were not limited to entries about Richardson and his sex life. The Post previously reported that it had viewed the diaries, which contained candid and often harsh assessments of public figures, politicians, and even members of his own family.
Kennedy wrote of Tom Hanks: "I thought the guy was a chronic complainer when he seemed to have the best luck on Earth." He was sharper about Bill Clinton: "He has sold out all who believed in him for trinkets and whatever else he got for those pardons." The journals also included references to Edwin Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy Jr., and coded entries that the Post connected to sexual encounters.
The breadth of the material suggests that Kennedy treated the diaries as a private ledger of his inner life, unfiltered, self-serving, and never meant for public consumption. That Richardson found them, and that they are now the backbone of a published biography, adds a layer of consequence Kennedy clearly did not anticipate.
Kennedy now holds one of the most consequential positions in the federal government. As HHS Secretary under President Trump, he has been at the center of policy fights over pesticides and public health and has faced legal challenges, including a federal judge's effort to block his restrictions on gender treatments for minors.
The diary revelations do not bear directly on his policy portfolio. But they land at a moment when the Kennedy family name remains deeply embedded in American political life. Nancy Pelosi recently backed JFK's grandson in a competitive race, a reminder that the dynasty's influence, and its baggage, extends well beyond any single member.
Several questions remain unanswered. The outcomes of Richardson's two drunken-driving arrests are not detailed. Whether the divorce was ever formally filed in court is unclear. The identities of the sources who spoke to Vincent have not been disclosed. And the documentary chain of custody for the diary entries, how they moved from Richardson's possession to a biographer's hands, has not been fully explained.
None of that changes what the entries themselves say. Kennedy wrote about his own appetites with remarkable candor, described a marriage hollowed out by his choices, and kept a record that his wife later discovered and that now sits in a book anyone can buy.
A man who writes down his own failings and then repeats them has made a confession, not a mistake. The question for the public is whether it matters, and for how long.