The Megyn Kelly Show - Truth About JFK's Cruelty and Predator Behavior, and New Reporting on JFK Jr., with Maureen Callahan | Ep. 823

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Megyn Kelly is joined by Maureen Callahan, author of "Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed," to discuss JFK’s inappropriate behavior at the White House, how he preyed on innocent young women, how the Kennedys have learned to kill bad press and continue to do so to this day, the cruelty of JFK when it came to losing a child, truth about Jackie's relationship with JFK, bizarre new details about Jackie's final moment with her husband's body, JFK and RFK's affairs with Marilyn Monroe, the terrible way they treated her, whether Bobby Kennedy could have had something to do with her death, JFK Jr.'s status as the most eligible bachelor at the time of his death, his odd obsession with danger, and more. Callahan- https://www.amazon.com/Ask-Not-Kennedys-Women-Destroyed/dp/0316276170/Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, I want to bring you an in-depth discussion. This is going to be so good, on a new book. I mean, it is the book about the Kennedy family that is generating a ton of headlines and for good reason. Among the new revelations in this book, a story about Jackie Kennedy kissing goodbye to every inch of John F. Kennedy's body. And I do mean every inch. Whether JFK and his brother Bobby Kennedy had anything to do with Marilyn Monroe's death. There's so much more. The book talks about something very key happening weeks before Marilyn was found dead. And the book raises questions about whether John F. Kennedy Jr.

was on a death mission during his reckless plane crash that killed him, his wife, and his sister-in-law. All right, Maureen, welcome back. So I don't even know where to begin. There's so much juicy stuff in here. Perhaps we should start with the man who's running for president, RFKJ, because you do get into his relationship with his ex-wife who died by suicide. I want to tell the audience, we reached out to RFKJ to respond to the allegations in Maureen's book. He did not get back to us, but this is new stuff where you are painting him as a very unsympathetic partner to a woman who was clearly struggling with some mental health issues. I do. And I, this to me is something that I so strongly feel should be central to his candidacy

and that he should really be questioned about. I spoke to several people who were very close to Mary and who told one of whom was her therapist, who not only spoke on the record, allowed herself to be named in the book, talked to me about counseling Mary alone and together with Bobby and how she refused at Bobby's request to label Mary as mentally ill. She said to him, your wife is angry and she is depressed, but she is not crazy. And this is one of the sort of pages that it just comes right out of the Kennedy playbook. When you're dealing with an inconvenient woman, call her crazy, lock her away, shunt her off to the side. So he tried to forcibly hospitalized her, hospitalized her. That didn't work. While she was falling apart over this marriage declining after she found Bobby's sex diaries, which I had access to. And in those diaries, he lists

the women and Megan, there are so many women, sometimes two or three in a single day, some of whom were friends of Mary and Bobby's. Women who he then ranked on a scale of one to 10. And that wasn't about sexual performance. That was in a sort of very juvenile way, a reflection of how far he went with them sexually. So she finds this and she, of course, is beyond distraught. And what he does in response is take up with a new girlfriend, his now wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, who people probably know from Curb Your Enthusiasm, moves very close by to Mary's house, cuts off her $20,000 court-approved funds to support their four children, has her begging at the school run, other mothers, do you have 20 bucks?

I need to fill my car up with gas. I need to buy some groceries. This is a woman who was up in Westchester in a million-dollar house that she redid as a reflection of the Kennedy brand. And he's got her peddling like a homeless person. This isn't just about that marriage, that adultery, that cruelty. This goes to a very central question. What does Bobby Kennedy really think of women? How can women be expected to vote for him and think he truly respects us and has our best interests at heart? I'd love to hear him weigh in on this.

I'm surprised he didn't give us any comment, right? Because normally he likes to weigh in, like he's not afraid of combat. I wonder whether he will, because the book is very detailed and has actual evidence you can read with your own eyes. It's not like some tabloid that you can just easily dismiss. I know he picked a woman as his running mate. He seems to really love his current wife, Cheryl.

But this would be fair game if it were Trump. And it's fair game, even though it's a Kennedy, especially because it's a Kennedy. Yeah, especially because it's a Kennedy. And, you know, the coda to Mary's heartbreaking story is that after he fought her siblings for her remains so he could bury her publicly in the Kennedy family plot, a week later, without the required permits, he secretly had her coffin dug up and moved 700 feet away to be buried alone on the side of a hill facing traffic it is a an act of extreme cruelty and spite and um a little a little back little nugget for your viewers and listeners vanity fair fought tooth and nail to get that act extract from the book about mary and bobby they fought tooth

and nail it was like why vanity fair they wanted it so they wound up getting this explosive chapter incredibly relevant this guy is running for the highest office days before it's due to be published they tell us sorry we can't run it they say what my publisher says why they say oh we don't have enough fact checkers i spent my own money hiring a fact checker this book was vetted front to back it was legaled eight ways to sunday sorry we don't have enough orders oh will you run it online can't do it i am I am beyond sure. I have no proof, but Bobby knew this book was coming. He knew this book was coming and I am sure the Kennedys got to Vanity Fair. By the way, Vanity Fair, the publication that under grading Carter and Tina Brown proudly published Dominic

Dunn, who was responsible for Bobby's cousin, Michael, Bobby, Michael's great defender, for Michael finally being criminally charged and tried in the savage sexual assault and murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley. That magazine once published incendiary, important, power-challenging reporting like that. Today, no more. Well, you point out in the book that other Kennedys, Maria Shriver and Carolyn Kennedy, the daughter of JFK, got a documentary that was going to air on, I can't remember what you said, but it was going to air on television about the History Channel. You got and they got that spiked. So it wouldn't be the first time if, you know, if there was involvement in getting it pulled, it would not be the first time at all.

It wouldn't. And, you know, this kind of sometimes it goes on in ways that are obvious to the person producing this counter narrative and sometimes not so. So, for example, my last book, American Predator was published by Viking. That book did gangbusters for them. It made them a ton of money, a ton of money. My editor said to me, after that book came out, whatever you want to publish next, we will do it. I said, it's this book. They said, we're going to make you a strong offer. They vaporized, vaporized. Month months later my agent comes back to me and says you know why they didn't publish this they were busy making a

backroom deal with maria shriver to give her her own imprint oh come on there you go maria shriver her imprint about like women's empowerment like it couldn't be more full of shit, frankly. You know, so stuff like this, which is, it's not gossip. It's reconsidered American history that is putting the stories, the true stories of these women and girls whose reputations have otherwise been shredded in the public square by the Kennedy machine,

finally front and center. And of course they don't like it, but I think it would be a power move for someone like a Maria Shriver to say, wait a minute. Yes. My family has a very complicated history with women. I was married to a guy with a very complicated history with women. I was married to a guy with a very complicated history with women who impregnated my housekeeper and kept that a secret for 13 years. You know, this is all, it's stuff that's in the water supply and it does no good to pretend that it's not there. Yeah. I'm sure the audience knows, but her husband of whom Maureen speaks was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's who did impregnate the maid.

And she had the baby. He has a son by this housekeeper in addition to his own children with Maria. So what I what I think is important about the book for the reasons you're stating is there's so much in here about the Kennedys that was kept secret for years because there was this wink and a nod deal between the press and the sitting president when it was JFK not to cover his extramarital affairs. Some has been exposed since his death. Much hasn't. And if you look at how we talk about Bill Clinton these days because of his multiple affairs and his coming on to young women and even talk about how Joe Biden is snipping the hair.

What JFK did with the young women is absolutely disgusting. He we all know that he was a serial philanderer on Jackie. I did not know that it stretched down to a 15 year old than a 19 year old girl after girl. Tell us about the 19-old girl who was working at the White House and on her first day got a tour of the White House by the president, John F. Kennedy. First day, 19-year-old virgin, very sheltered girl, Mimi Beardsley. JFK's consigliere, Dave Powers, calls her at her desk. Why don't you come up to the White House residence? Have a drink after work. She's thinking like, well, this is a young president. He's cool. He's unlike anybody else. Maybe this is just sort of how things go here. She goes up there. She's handed daiquiris. She's gotten drunk. The president suddenly materializes. Mimi, would you like a tour? Next thing you know, she finds herself on Jackie's bed. Jackie's away. He's on top of her. She says, short of screaming, there was nothing I could do to get him off of me. Mimi had never even been kissed before a minute he takes her virginity tells her to wash herself up days later she's back at her desk gets a call why don't you come swimming with the president

and take a dip on one of his afternoon swims she goes in there's Dave Powers again. JFK's in the pool. Dave's got his feet dangling there. JFK says to Mimi, again, 19 years old, Mimi, Dave looks a little tense. Why don't you go over there and relax him? She knew what that meant. She goes over and to her great shame, she has said this herself, performs oral sex on Dave Powers while JFK stands there and watches. Not an isolated incident. He tries it again months later in a room. His brother Teddy's there. He says, Mimi, Teddy looks a little tense. Why don't you relieve him of that? At that moment, she says no. But this is the kind of predatory abuse. I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg with him and with so many Kennedy men.

But that really breaks my heart. He's taking these young women who are probably so excited to be working in the White House. I mean, it is very familiar with the Monica Lewinsky thing and turning them into horse. He was turning them into his horse, his harem to service other men, other family members. It's absolutely disgusting. The way that we lionize this family and you put the lie to that too, to Camelot and Jackie and how that was a Jackie Kennedy created myth that she insisted on creating, fabricating with the help of Life magazine. Tell us about that story. Yeah, I mean, and again, the entire press corps knew what was going on with JFK and not just the philandering, but the like shoving teenagers like Mimi into like the boots of cars to hide from the press.

They all knew about it. So after JFK is assassinated and the nation suffers through this trauma, everybody's willing to do whatever Jackie says. And what Jackie wants is a mythologized version of her husband, not just his administration, but of their marriage. And she conscripts Theodore White, who was a fan boy of JFK's. He comes up to her house. She gives him this interview. She knows exactly what she's going to tell him and what she's not. And in the end, this myth is what comes back to bite her really in the ass because she becomes a fiction herself, a fiction of her own creation. And she who will later, and Jackie, believe it or not, really is the heroine of this book. And I have great admiration for her and what she made of her life.

But what she did, whether she was cognizant at the time or not in creating this myth was allowed for the, allowed for rather the destruction of so many other girls and women in her way. That's right. She insisted on putting the line about Camelot into this Life magazine piece. And the writer knew it was a lie that there was that JFK, she she told some story about how he used to put it on the record player. They had an old vitrola in the White House and JFK, this guy who's banging everything with it that's got a skirt on is like, oh, sweetheart, let's play the part about, you know, from the from the play Cam the play camelot about you know for for one brief shining moment there was camelot on the record player over and over and the life writer knows this isn't true and the editors say

no and she was like it's going in there and she wanted that myth alive notwithstanding the fact you reveal in the book he had jfk is believed to have given her chlamydia that possibly played a role in her two miscarriages. She the worst story. I mean, the worst story other than Mary Jo Kopechny, you know, was killed by Ted Kennedy, although there's quite a few to choose from, is the stillborn baby and how JFK behaved. Can you tell us that one? This story was beyond, I mean, I thought I had read and heard everything. So Jackie is eight months pregnant. She is finally carrying a baby to term. As you said, she's had two miscarriages. She so badly wants to be a mother. JFK says to her, I'm going off sailing in the Med with my friend, Senator Smathers, who everybody knew what those two got up to together. Everybody, Jackie included. She says to him, please, will you stay with me? I am so worried about having this baby. He says, nope. Off he

goes to the med, to a yacht, surrounded by starlets and bikini babes, drinking, smoking, carousing. Jackie goes into premature labor, wakes up and is told she had a stillborn daughter, a daughter she never saw, a daughter she never held. Bobby Kennedy, Jack's brother, materializes at her bedside. And she says, where is my husband? I want my husband. And he says to her, he's unreachable in the med. And that was a lie because Jack was, of course, reachable in the med. And Bobby himself had spoken to Jack. And when he told him about this and that the baby had been stillborn, Jack said to him, what does it matter? The baby is dead and refused to come home. Jackie spent about eight days in a hospital bed alone, mourning a baby she

never saw, did not have the strength to bury herself. And Jack returns after eight to 10 days after Smathers says to him, if you ever want to be president, you better haul your ass back to your wife. And so he does. And he tells the media, this is the cherry on top. He had no idea what had happened. And Jackie hadn't told him

because she didn't want to quote, ruin his vacation. My God. I mean, truly this, this is a monstrous life partner. I, whenever people have their individual opinions about his policy, but what kind of a man who could ever be respected knowing these facts about him. And yet, you know, when you write that scene that we mentioned in the intro about after his assassination and Jackie at the hospital going in there and you can tell, you know, about the kissing, this, this new information, she loved him. She did love him. And the hard part. So to, for the, I don't want to bury the lead here,

but after the assassination and you know, all the men around her, his aides, the surgeons, the priests who were called in, they were all losing their shit. Like they could not keep themselves together. Jackie kept herself together.

She was the one who kept her composure. She demanded to be left alone with her husband. And she did. She took the sheet. She removed it it she kissed every part of his body including his penis and i believe that was a symbolic act on her part needing to be the last woman of all of his women to fully possess him um but to that story wait what was your original question i completely forgot when i loved him that just that that she loved him notwithstanding all the bad stuff she loved him yeah no 100 and that was the real challenge of this book because as i was learning all of these

details that as they approved painted a portrait of a monster who I believe really did not like women. Um, I, I, Jackie was no idiot. She was extremely bright, you know, and for women of her class at that time, like making a marriage, you know, that was the most important thing you could do. That was really going to sort of dictate much of your life. I had to work hard to find the JFK that she fell in love with. Like there had to be really things about him that were so special that, you know, really could explain the sort of love she had for him and why she stuck it out. It wasn't just about power, which is such a misogynistic trope that's often thrown her way. She was power hungry. She was greedy. She wanted fame. She really did love him. And I think that they bonded over uniquely terrible childhoods in which they were both

neglected and abused to a degree. They were essentially loners. She described herself and the president as twin icebergs, very composed above the surface, but all of the messy, interesting stuff sort of breaking apart furiously below. He had been a very, very, very sick boy, hospitalized multiple times, left alone by his parents as a toddler to fight life-threatening illnesses in hospitals around America, she understood that lonely boy in him. She also relished, as he did her, she was probably the only woman whose intellect he really appreciated and reveled in. One of my favorite little details about their bond was every Sunday,

he would read the New York Times book review and he would circle all the titles he was interested in. And by the end of the week, Jackie would make sure all of those books were piled on his nightstand. They were both voracious readers who loved history and they were true intellects, but they also loved gossip. They were like bitchy little gossips together, you know? So it wasn't all dark. You know, there were these really interesting, unique things that really made them such an exceptional couple. How do we know the story about what she did when alone with his dying body. That had actually been reported before.

It was in another biography, but there have been so many. And so often many of them will just have one or two new pieces of information and they kind of get lost. They also have never been sort of put together in this kind of a framework, you know, the Kennedy women and how those who survived really psychologically willed themselves to. And so when I came across that piece of information, I mean, it blew my mind. I was like, how do more people not know this? It's similar to, so she had given a series of interviews after the assassination and

they've been sealed until a hundred years after JFK's death. So they're sealed until 2063. And one of the reasons was she said something that she came to heartily regret and nobody really knew what it was. And I reached out to that historian's son and he shared with me this like four page handwritten note Jackie had told him that the night before the assassination, she and the president had had sex and that they were hoping for another baby. And she later had what we in the trade call source remorse. She was sorry. She had said it. She begged him to remove it from his account of the, you know, the authorized account of the assassination death of a president and he did um but that sort of goes to the private jackie who was quite sexual and really wanted you know she she wanted such a better sex life with her husband she actually went and spoke to a doctor about it um as first lady which you know it's

placing an enormous amount of trust in somebody not to squeal that you're basically saying your husband's a two pump chump, you know, and what can you do to that? Well, that's one of the themes that emerges throughout this is that sex with JFK would be about three minutes long. He would never kiss you on the lips. And if he even took off his clothes, it was a big deal. Like basically just whipped it out and had sex and moved on. I mean, it was just, it sounds completely transactional and moved on. I mean, it was just, it sounds completely transactional and unpleasant, frankly. I guess he got away with it because he was Jack Kennedy. But what happened with Jackie, both with respect to Marilyn Monroe, that's interesting. And then with respect to Aristotle Onassis, I had no idea. And I also had no idea of the new portrait you paint of JFK Jr. and his relationship

with Carolyn Bessette. That too was not the Camelot that was portrayed by the media. And you've got such an interesting theory on him and the, the risking the risk-taking that was definitely connected to how he died and she died and her sister died. I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megan Kelly Show on Triumph, a Sirius XM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey,

and yours truly, Megyn Kelly. You can stream the Megyn Kelly show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are. No car required. I do it all the time. I love the SiriusXM app. It has ad-free music coverage of every

major sport, comedy, talk, podcast, and more. Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free. Go to SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply. Let's talk about the Marilyn Monroe moment where she famously appeared at his birthday party. He was the sitting president of the United States. She was the biggest star in the world.

She showed up in the saucy dress that Kim Kardashian would get years later and show up at the Met Gala in. I just threw up a little in my mouth. And Marilyn, who just oozed sex appeal very naturally, like no one before or since, saying happy birthday in an incredibly sultry and sexy way. You write about that moment and you write about Jacqueline Kennedy's reaction to it. Tell us. Yeah. I mean, this was one of those, like it's on par with the moon landing in terms of an unprecedented moment in American culture. So Marilyn, who right before that, by the way, had been backstage in her green room with bobby jack's brother having sex with him and then takes the stage she's a little drunk she's a little sort of feeling it from her little tryst takes the stage at madison square garden a packed house of 25, 30,000 people, the president of the United States, the married president of the United States in the audience, who's happy birthday to him in such a way that

she is telling the world we are having an affair. Jackie Kennedy, full well knowing what's about to probably happen stays at home with her horses and her children says nothing does nothing but sends in her absence a very clear message that your first lady shares your values and is also appalled and what also is interesting about Jackie is that for all of JFK's affairs, this one threatened her the most. This one, if this had gotten out, off now and have zero contact with her again, I'm going to divorce you. I'm going to take the kids and you can kiss a second term goodbye. And what did Jack do? That was it. Cut her off. And that led to Marilyn's decompensation and ultimate death, which he and Bobby probably had a hand in. Bobby Kennedy was in LA on the day Marilyn died and Bobby Kennedy's son, RFKJ was on our show. And I asked him about theories that his dad had something to do with her death. And he said, the only people who say that are people who are trying to sell books. It's not

true, but there's a lot of evidence to show that Bobby Kennedy was in L.A. on the day that she died. But there's not evidence that he killed her or had a hand in it directly. It's just suspicion. But it's not suspicion, Maureen, that both Bobby and JFK helped ruin this woman. They tossed her around like a sexual play thing. They would call their father, Joe, with Marilyn on the phone to prove that they were having sex with her. She was like a trophy. She was this disposable toy.

I mean, dogs treat their chew toys with a little more care. What they did to her was an abomination. And Bobby was in LA on the day she died that's part of historical record there was audio that disappeared after her death that 20 or 30 years later another journalist found worked with a former detective with LAPD. On that audio, Bobby is heard in Marilyn's house yelling at Marilyn, where is it? Where the fuck is it? We need it. We will make any arrangements you want, but it's important to the family. And then on that audio, you hear a thump so something or someone got pushed into a wall

or down on the floor i'm gonna say maybe 30 years later abc news so this is the 80s so 20 years later abc news was about to run a prime time special under the news banner about what happened to Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy brothers involvement. And they had that audio within hours of airtime, the head of ABC news yanked it. He was very close with Ethel Kennedy, but claimed that there was no conflict of interest in said decision. And Megan, you know, I know I think we've talked about this a bit, but, you know, for those elitists or members of the establishment who laugh at those Americans who believe that there is a deep state, you read stuff like this and you understand why. Yeah. The FBI was bugging her phones. And CIA, they were bugging her. They had her phone records. What else goes missing after her death? Phone records uncovered later by a British journalist named Anthony Summers. You can read it in his book, Goddess, about Marilyn.

About eight desperate calls that Marilyn had made to Bobby at the Department of Justice when he was serving as Attorney General of the United States. Those had gone missing. Why? Who got them? Where'd they go? Why were they vanished? Who were they protecting? And what was she calling about? What was she calling about? What was she calling about? Which, yeah. Look, we know from the Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechny story, what the Kennedys will do to cover up a family member's sick deed.

And that involved what was essentially a murder. I mean, it was he drove off that bridge, not intentionally, but while drunk with this 29 year old woman in the car. And he left her. You document this very well in the book, too. He left her to die in that car when she was savable. And the reaction of the Kennedy family was not that's terrible. Take responsibility. It was to deny, protect, cover up and save his career, which they did. You know, I'm so glad you brought this portion of the book up because this is really what inspired me to write this book. I remember watching the funeral of Ted Kennedy on American television, which was wall-to-wall coverage. He's lying in state in the Capitol. Thousands of Americans are flying from all over the country to

pay their respects. The news, these guys are on TV, these Kennedy-loving so-called journos weeping and rending their garments, the last lion of the Senate, last living Kennedy brother. Did I hear the words Chappaquiddick once? Did we hear the name Mary Jo Kopechny once? He's eulogized by President Obama and statesmen. Nobody had a word to say about this woman. And I was inflamed. It just incensed me. This young woman who was a 29 year old virgin was torn to shreds reputationally by the Kennedys. What was she doing in his car with a married

Senator late at night? Why wasn't she wearing underwear? She must've had it coming. So here's Ted Kennedy. Here's what he does that night. Here's what the media never reports about. He gets out of that car. She's stuck in there upside down, her head craned at this painful angle, surviving on an air pocket. Instead of going for help, he passes by lit houses. He passes by a fire department. He passes by pay phones. He goes back to his inn. He goes up there, calls down to the front desk. There's a party next door. It's ruining his ability to sleep. Won't they do something about that? Goes to sleep. Loses not a wink. Wakes up. Showers, shaves, has a hearty breakfast, says hellos to people at the inn. Then he goes to the police department and informs the chief while standing behind the chief's own

desk that he, Ted Kennedy, would like to make a statement about a little incident he had the night before. It's horrifying. You point out in the book, she did not drown. She did not drown. That's not how she died. She suffocated to death in that when that air pocket ran out and was likely very aware of what was happening to her. And yet his reputation got completely whitewashed by a family that knows how to do it. And frankly, I think this is the reference you were making earlier to RFKJ and his attempts to rehabilitate this Michael Skakel, who's also a Kennedy. He's got a different last name, but he's a Kennedy accused of murdering. He was a kid at the time himself, 15, 15 year old Martha Moxley.

Kennedy denied it on my show a month ago. This came up again and he denied it, tried to blame it on these two kids who weren't from this Tony neighborhood in Greenwich. But I believe 100% that Michael Skakel committed this crime. The point is they rally, they have power, they have connections, and they have a history of rallying those wagons, not in a search for truth at all, but to make sure if anything is wrong, it is covered up and somebody else gets blamed. So Martha Moxley was a 15 year old girl, a beautiful, popular, vivacious girl who loved life and Michael Skakel had a thing for her. When the police found her on her own property, they thought Martha was a redhead. She was a white blonde. That's how

savagely she was beaten. Her hair was soaked in blood. And what was she beaten to death with? A golf club that came from Michael Skakel's house that was emblazoned with his mother's initials. black, one mixed race, traveled all the way from the Bronx to get themselves there to go, quote, caveman on a teenage girl because they were obsessed with her beautiful blonde hair. You name me a single conservative who could talk like this and accuse with no basis in fact, two young boys of color by name of this heinous crime that can only be linked to the Skakel house and have them be able to run for president. You've got to be kidding me. He has a lot to answer for with this. I've read a lot about that case. I love true crime, so I follow a lot of this stuff. And I know Dominique Dunn did the reporting you mentioned earlier, Mark Furman wrote a whole book about this, which is well worth your time. And then RFKJ wrote his own book trying to rehabilitate

Michael Skakel. But I know from that reading, Michael Skakel was big on animal torture and was and admitted he was in a tree jerking off to Martha Moxley shortly before the murder. Like who does that? First of all, animal torture is almost always a precursor to human murder. And who jerks off in a tree and admits it to a girl who just happens to get killed later that day? The theory was that he was mad. She may have fooled around with his brother, but not him. But he had had a lot of behavioral, very bizarre troubles prior to the night Martha was killed. And her own diaries reflect she was afraid of him and saw that he was bizarre. She knew she should stay away from him. Yeah, her own diaries. And, you know, to this point, it's not just the Kennedy men. There's such a sickness in that family. And it really seeps into the culture and the way we talk about these girls and women, where the women themselves defend this indefensible behavior against their own gender. So Ethel Kennedy, the sainted Ethel Kennedy, now she too, a widow, you know, her husband slain by an assassin. She writes a letter to the judge in Michael's case.

And she surely intended this letter to become public because it was published in newspapers around the country in New York. I think the Daily News published it. And in this letter, it's just a litany of poor Michael, poor Michael. Michael's mother died. Tragic, yes, but doesn't excuse anything. Michael's mother died. He struggled so much. He's got all these problems. He's just doing his best. Please, God, this family has had so much loss, like none of itself inflicted. Are you kidding me? Please spare poor Michael. She never said he didn't do it. Let's go back to Aristotle Onassis.

I didn't know any of this stuff about him. All I knew was he had billions and billions of dollars and kind of seemed to rescue Jackie. There's a lot more to the story. Yeah. I mean, Jackie, for him, that was sort of like landing the hope diamond, the crown jewel of all crown jewels. He was going to acquire the sainted Jacqueline Kennedy, the most famous, most admired woman in the world. So they sit down to sort of hash this out and they're aware this is a brand merger. He needs her so he can expand his business in America. And he also needs her respectability. He is a Bulgarian. The world knows it. She needs his money, his security. He has a yacht that's the size of a Navy destroyer. And she also wants to knock her own reputation down a peg.

She wants some liberation from this confining role as the widow Kennedy. So anyway, they sit down and they hash out what's her cost? What's the price of this great good? She counter, she opens with 20 million. Aristotle Onassis has his people counter back. Your client could price herself out of the market. I mean, it's amazing. So they settle on like, you know, a couple of million X, Y, Z.

Next comes the marital contract, what we call the sex contract. How many times she's going to have to have sex with this gnome like Bulgarian, by the way, a bisexual who has a penchant for young boys that he pays for sex and then savagely beats afterward. Oh my. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up, Megan. I know it sounds incredible because it is. You couldn't make it up. So they have this sex contract drawn up. She also includes a clause that wherever they are, they're going to have separate bedrooms. There will not be children produced in this marriage. Soon. She's like, I'm out of here. She's spending more time in New York than she is with him in Greece. And he has this thing. He's so resentful of her, even though he's carrying on publicly with his former lover, Maria Callas,

world famous herself, opera singer. He will summon her from her penthouse in New York just to have sex with her and send her back. And he would tell everyone in his orbit, it was to remind Jackie of who and what she was to him. He sounds like a villain. I had no idea, but it is a reminder, you know, for people on the outside of these incredibly powerful circles and families, we are sold a bill of goods. Like, just don't believe it. It's like her poor, poor Jackie. I mean, I realized she was an adult. She made her own decisions, but like, these were not, these were not good marriages. These were not good situations. You may be sitting at home right now with your loving spouse in the

Midwest, in a modest house with nice kids and nowhere near this kind of paycheck. Be thankful, be thankful. Like it's just not the way the media and these families themselves portray it. Especially vast amounts of money and political power. Those are terrible goals and people who make those their idols, um, wind up getting what they deserve. Uh, okay. Let's talk about the son JFK jr. Because you and I live this, right? Like anybody who's 50 remembers everything about him basically because you know, he was born just a few years before we were, and he was the God. He was like the biggest catch in America. I remember once he failed the bar exam three times in New York state. And I went to Albany law, which is in New York state. And he only passed the bar exam. Maybe

he failed it two times and he passed it on the third time. He only passed it because he came to Albany law school one summer to study, uh, for the New York state bar exam. And every woman there was like, I'm going to land him. It was hilarious. A number of women were like, he's coming here. Well, Carolyn Bessette is the one who, quote, landed him. And while we all know now that they died in this terrible, tragic, awful plane crash with him as the pilot, along with her sister, what I didn't know was that he had a lifetime of reckless decision-making, irresponsible risk-taking. And this was just the latest example in what did kind of look like a death wish quest for him. You're so right. This is exactly the case. And this goes perfectly to what you just said. Don't believe the images that you're seeing of these ultra-wealthy, ultra-famous, ultra-celebrated and envied people.

It's never like that behind closed doors. And Carolyn Bissett, if this book does anything, will be the last woman who marries into that so-called dynasty with the idea that she has landed a prize. Back then, JFK Jr. was in a class of his own. There was no movie star, no rock star, no politician, no royal, true royal, who could compete with JFK Jr. The looks, the legacy, the regard, the pedestal, this culture put him on. So Carolyn lands him thinking she's won a prize. And I promise anyone who reads this book will come away going, Carolyn very quickly realized that she landed a booby prize, perhaps the booby prize of all. This was a guy who had never been told no, who had never really struggled bar exam or what,

like he was sort of given a lot of leeway and special treatment in order to finally pass that thing. He had a lifetime, not just of really exhibiting a death wish with extremely risky behavior, but he had a penchant, almost like a kink, for bringing the women in his life along girlfriend in their late teens, early twenties, Christina Hogg, and she has written about this. He takes her out kayaking on the open water, the ocean. He knows nothing about it. She's got her leg in a cast. They almost get killed multiple times. She begs him at one point, let's just wait for help. Let's just wait for help. And he says, no, we're going back out. They barely escaped with their lives after nearly drowning. I'm going to say four or five times when they get back, she says to him, we could have died out there. And he says to her, yeah, but what a way to go. So now let's flash forward to this flight and we're about to, in America, undergo

the 25th anniversary of this thing where we're all going to be told, oh, JFK Jr., what a shame. What did we lose? We lost a future president. We should be so relieved that this guy would never see the inside of the Oval Office. He gets up in that plane, a plane that was way too powerful for the likes of him, a beginning pilot, not instrument rated, didn't know how to fly this thing at night. Multiple other pilots on the tarmac that night told him not to go up. They weren't, and they had way more experience. He breaks every single rule of aviation. Now a little just backstory, everything in this guy's life is falling apart. He's not talking to his sister.

They're fighting over Jackie's estate. His marriage is falling apart. He has moved out. His magazine is about to fold. His publisher has sent him a letter in which they memorialize his stewardship as, quote, lazy and stupid. He has zero internal fortitude to deal with any of these failings. He's about to be humiliated, JFK Jr., on a massive scale. So what does he do? He gets in that plane with his wife and his sister, doesn't file a flight plan, doesn't check the weather report. You will see that reported in other biographies. It is a lie. In the NTSB official report of that crash, he didn't do any of that stuff. He gets up there. He cuts off communication with ground control and he also disables his automatic pilot five minutes in what happens he's on a direct collision course with an american airlines plane full of 283 passengers the pilots of the american airlines flight are frantically trying to radio this clueless pilot they can't get a hold of him because he turned everything off. They call ground controls like, yeah, we can't reach him either. They have to divert so this guy doesn't slam into them and kill hundreds of people before he spirals into the ocean.

Those bodies were not left intact. Hitting the ocean the way he did, that's like hitting concrete. But we never hear any of this stuff. We just hear, oh my God, what a tragedy. The Kennedy curse strikes again. No, it wasn't a curse. It was his own incessant need to live a life of risk and not just risk his own, but risk the life of his wife, the life of his sister-in-law. And one of the most stunning moments for me when I was reading it, Maureen, was you quote Carolyn's mother at their rehearsal dinner. She knew this was not going to end well. And she openly said, I'm, I'm not sure she should be marrying you. Like she said it publicly. Like, I'm not sure about this marriage. She understood obviously

from her daughter that the image we'd been getting fed did not match up with the reality. No. And you just put that wedding photo up, which is the photo that went around the world, right? The Prince of Camelot anoints his princess and her mother. Imagine how bad it had to be behind the scenes. Imagine how many times, and it's in the book, she had tried to tell Carolyn, get rid of this guy. Cut him loose. He's a loser. He's not good for you. This won't end well. She has to say it at the reception. That's a real act of desperation to try at that last moment to throw a grenade into this and make it stop. And she couldn't. And she couldn't. And she couldn't. And three years into the marriage, her daughter would die as a result of JFK Jr.'s risky behaviors, which were a pattern. They were not a one-off. It was not a curse and it was not bad luck. It was a terrible, terrible decision that he made that night. And it was part of a pattern of the, wow, this book has got a ton

of these bombshells. Again, the name of it is ask not the Kennedys and the women they destroyed, which is out next week. Get it now. It's about time someone wrote this and there's nobody better to do it than you, Maureen. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I couldn't have asked for a better launch to this book or a better person to talk about this with. The pleasure was mine. I enjoyed every page and please believe me, audience, we've only scratched the surface. There's so much more. I guarantee, guarantee you will not be sorry that you bought this book and enjoy. Okay. We're going to be back later on today with the fifth column talking about the big debate. Thanks for listening to the Megyn Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. Thank you.