She also points out that the media circus of the televised trial—which arguably begins the era of real-life court cases as popular spectacle—was hard for her to take. “To some people, this has been entertainment,” she says. “It was a tragedy. It was a trauma for me.”
Among those who especially profit from the trial is Roy Black, who not only gains a television career and more celebrity clients, but even romance—about nine months after the trial ends, Roy Black runs into juror Lea Haller at a Coral Gables bar. The two begin dating, and marry in 1994. From 2011 to 2013, Haller appears as a main cast member on three seasons of Bravo TV’s reality show The Real Housewives of Miami, where Black occasionally appears with her on camera.
Willie earns his medical degree from Georgetown, but finds himself again in the news in 1993, when he’s arrested on October 23 for assaulting a bouncer in Virginia. He pleads no contest to the charges, and sidesteps the court date that had been scheduled for December 3, in part to avoid what would’ve been “a circus” as well as “to be with his mother in Ireland for the holidays,” as Jean Kennedy Smith had just been named the US ambassador to Ireland a few months earlier.
He founds a Chicago-based humanitarian group but resigns as the head in 2004, after a lawsuit (later dismissed) alleges that three separate employees had come forward with claims of sexual harassment. Willie denies the charges, claiming, “Family and personal history have made me vulnerable to these kinds of untruths.”
Chapter 47
When you look at the third generation of Kennedy men, much of what remains of a once powerful dynasty is good teeth, good hair and the best public relations a trust fund can buy,” Time magazine announces in May 1997.
While the family as a whole remains devoted to public service, whether through government (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is lieutenant governor of Maryland, while her brother Joseph Kennedy II and their cousin Patrick Kennedy are both congressmen in the U.S. House of Representatives, for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, respectively) or philanthropy (founding programs such as the Special Olympics, Citizens Energy, or Physicians Against Land Mines), it’s certainly true that the once-mythologized Kennedy image has taken a few hits over the last decades.
“For those of us who were born after the assassination, I don’t think we have the same perspective or the same investment,” remarks one twenty-something in 1997. “I’m more in touch with the scandals that have been coming out lately than the whole higher mythology.”
A caustic Newsweek cover story entitled “Dynasty in Decline” reminds readers how in the 1960s, JFK and RFK embodied prosperity and social justice; now in the 1990s, “the drama is not so grand…[the younger Kennedys] are emblems of a tabloid time, a fin-de-siècle moment when public life seems less important and stories about sex more titillating.”
The combination of Kennedys and sex is nothing new, of course, but what’s prompting these latest critiques of Joe and Rose’s grandchildren are two salacious stories that land within days of each other. The first involves Bobby and Ethel’s oldest son, Joe Kennedy II, who’s taken a hit in the polls with the publication of his ex-wife Sheila Rauch Kennedy’s book Shattered Faith, about her resistance to Joe’s petition to have their twelve-year marriage annulled so that he can marry his fiancée and staff member, Beth Kelly, in the Catholic Church. It’s the details that truly hurt the forty-four-year-old, six-term congressman—accusations that he was a bully who decried his ex as a “nobody,” his lack of concern over Sheila’s objections, that he was insensitive enough to serve her the annulment papers while on vacation in the Caribbean with his girlfriend, even his characterization of the annulment itself as just “Catholic gobbledygook.”
Joe’s been openly planning a run for Massachusetts governor, and allegations of his callous behavior causes backlash among his mostly Irish Catholic constituents, though at first it seems there’s every chance the ground he’s losing can be recovered over the year and a half between the book’s publication and the election.
But less than two days after Sheila appears on Primetime Live to launch her book tour, an even bigger Kennedy scandal overwhelms the annulment pushback. On April 25, 1997, the Boston Globe breaks the shocking story about an alleged affair between Joe’s younger brother Michael Kennedy, a thirty-nine-year-old married father of three, and Marisa Verrochi, his family’s nineteen-year-old former live-in babysitter. Even more disturbing—and potentially constituting statutory rape—are accusations that the affair began as far back as five years earlier, putting the babysitter at a mere fourteen years old.
“I’m told Ethel is devastated over this,” biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, author of The Other Mrs. Kennedy, says, adding that in his estimation, this was the “seamiest” Kennedy scandal yet. “Michael was the apple of her eye. He was among the Kennedys who were seen as the future of the clan.”
Indeed, Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, the middle child in Bobby and Ethel’s brood of eleven, is the one Bobby Jr. calls “Mummy’s favorite.” Not that the other siblings resent that title, he says. “No one was jealous of her love for him because he was everyone else’s favorite, too.” Both Teddy and Ethel notice a certain similarity to his father in Michael. “Ethel always felt that he was a lot like Bobby. Very bright, quick,” a family friend notes, while Teddy recalls once glancing at Michael in profile and feeling overcome: “The resemblance was so striking, I had to just sit there and stare at him for a moment,” he says.
In 1981, Michael marries Victoria Gifford, daughter of football great Frank Gifford, and they have three children: a son, Michael Jr. in January 1983, and two daughters, Kyle Francis in July 1984 and Rory Gifford in November 1987. Like many Kennedys, Michael goes to Harvard, and, like his father and uncle Ted, the University of Virginia Law School. After graduating in 1984, he goes to work with his brother Joe at Citizens Energy, a company Joe started to help low-income families with heating oil. When Joe wins his first term in Congress—taking over from Tip O’Neill the seat his uncle Jack had held from 1947 to 1953—Michael becomes president and CEO at Citizens Energy.
Among the notoriously competitive siblings, Michael and Joe are said to be the most competitive with each other. “They resent each other because neither one gets what the other does,” says one family friend. “Michael didn’t get to run for Congress; Joe did. Joe, on the other hand, resents Michael because Michael made money, while Joe never did.”
But a race to see who can tarnish the Kennedy name faster is not a competition either brother wishes to win.
Chapter 48
On January 22, 1995, Michael’s wife, Vicki, woke up to find her husband missing from their bed. Perplexed, she begins looking for him throughout their million-dollar home in Cohasset, a seaside suburb of Boston. She can’t find him anywhere.
Surely he’s not in Marisa’s room?
The soon-to-be-seventeen-year-old is the daughter of Michael’s close friend, neighbor, and Democratic donor, billionaire entrepreneur Paul Verrochi. It’s well known that even before Marisa moved in, “Michael Kennedy would call her parents and say they were going to be out late and that [Marisa] should sleep over,” neighbor Dan Collins tells Time magazine.