A forthcoming biography of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. draws on private diary entries in which he described his own compulsive infidelity, his fraying marriage to second wife Mary Richardson Kennedy, and the guilt he carried through it all, writings that Richardson herself reportedly seized and hid as "insurance" in the final months of her life.
The book, "RFK, Jr.: The Fall and Rise," by New York Post investigative reporter Isabel Vincent, goes on sale April 14. Vincent obtained the diary entries roughly a year after Richardson's death in May 2012. The entries, said to have been written in 2001, offer a raw self-portrait of a man who knew he had everything and acknowledged he was bent on wrecking it.
Kennedy now serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Trump, overseeing a sprawling federal health apparatus. The diary revelations land at a moment when his public credibility is already a live political question, and when the personal conduct of senior officials draws scrutiny that goes well beyond policy.
In one entry from 2001, Kennedy wrote plainly about the gap between his blessings and his behavior:
"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 passage captured a restless appetite he made no effort to disguise on the page: "No matter how much I have, I want more!"
Kennedy also described the marital bedroom in bleak terms: "Our bed is an unfriendly place." He added: "She 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."
The picture that emerges is not of a man blindsided by marital collapse. It is of a man who cataloged his own failings with remarkable precision, and kept going.
A 2013 New York Post report described the journal as a 398-page document from 2001 that recorded daily activities alongside the names of women and numbered codes for sexual encounters. That earlier reporting said 37 women were listed in the ledger, and 16 entries were marked with a "10", which Richardson allegedly said meant intercourse. Kennedy reportedly wrote the phrase "my lust demons" in the journal and used the word "Victory" on days without a woman's name listed.
Kennedy married Mary Richardson in 1994. She was the mother of four of his six children. Their marriage lasted 18 years on paper, but the diary entries suggest deep fractures at least as early as 2001, seven years in.
On Mother's Day 2010, Kennedy told his wife he wanted to file for divorce. In the days that followed, Richardson pored over his diaries, the book reports. Those close to her said she came to believe she had been married to a "chronic philanderer" for nearly two decades.
The fallout was severe. Richardson was arrested twice for drunken driving after Kennedy announced his intention to divorce. Those who knew her attributed her spiral, in part, to the weight of what she had discovered, and to the way Kennedy had handled her suspicions over the years.
A source close to Richardson told Vincent's book:
"He definitely gaslit her and told her that she was crazy and that her accusations about other women were fantasies."
The same source described Richardson as "innocent and naive, but 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 the Kennedy name and the life it represented:
"She was just 200% invested in being his wife and living the Kennedy lifestyle."
Another source put it more starkly: "The notion that she would stop being a Kennedy was scary to her."
The divorce was never finalized. In May 2012, Richardson hanged herself at the couple's estate in Bedford, Westchester County. She was found dead before any settlement or decree was signed. Kennedy married actress Cheryl Hines, known for "Curb Your Enthusiasm," in 2014.
Vincent's book reports that Richardson took the diary entries and hid them as "insurance" during the final months of her life. The implication, drawn from the book's sourcing, is that Richardson viewed the diaries as leverage, or at least as proof, in whatever legal or personal reckoning lay ahead.
Vincent obtained the entries about a year after Richardson's death. The book does not identify who provided them. Nor does the available reporting indicate whether the diary entries have been independently authenticated beyond Vincent's own review.
Those are open questions that matter. Diary entries, by nature, are one-sided documents. They capture what the writer chose to put on paper, not necessarily what happened. But when the writer is now a cabinet secretary, and the entries describe a pattern of conduct that sources say contributed to a woman's death, the public interest is plain.
Kennedy's trajectory from environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic to HHS secretary has already generated no shortage of controversy. His role in reshaping federal nutrition guidance drew sharp reactions from health experts. And the broader personnel landscape around Trump's health appointments has been turbulent, with the surgeon general nomination hitting resistance from within the GOP itself.
None of this is a criminal matter. Kennedy has not been charged with anything related to these diary entries or his marriage. The question is one of character, and whether voters and lawmakers weigh personal conduct when evaluating the people who run the government.
The Kennedy family name has carried both political power and personal scandal for generations. The dynasty continues to shape Democratic and national politics in ways that go far beyond any single member. But the pattern described in these diaries, self-aware recklessness, dismissal of a spouse's concerns, and a trail of damage left behind, is not a dynasty problem. It is a personal one.
Richardson's story is not unusual in its broad strokes. Women in high-profile marriages often find themselves isolated, disbelieved, and blamed for the consequences of someone else's choices. What makes this case different is the paper trail. Kennedy, by his own hand, wrote down what he was doing and why. He described his compulsions. He named the emptiness at the center of his marriage. And then, by all accounts, he kept going.
The people who pay the price for that kind of conduct are rarely the ones who write the diaries. They are the spouses, the children, and the families left to sort through the wreckage. Richardson's four children lost their mother. The divorce she dreaded never came. The reckoning she feared arrived in a form no one should have to face.
Transparency in government has been a running theme of the current political era. Previous administrations faced their own questions about hidden agendas and suppressed information. When a cabinet official's private writings surface and reveal a pattern of deception toward the person closest to him, the public is entitled to ask what else stays hidden.
The book hits shelves April 14. The diary entries will speak for themselves. The harder question is whether anyone in a position to act will bother to listen.
A man who writes down his own failings in meticulous detail and then changes nothing has given you all the character testimony you need.
