The House of Kennedy(72)
Privately, the family is furious with Michael, but publicly, they close ranks to keep the sordid news from leaking out.
“I wanted to kick his [ass],” Christopher Kennedy says of when he first heard the news about his brother Michael’s affair with the babysitter, but the natural impulse among the family, as always, is to circle the wagons. Word spreads quickly among the cousins. “We talk to each other a lot, partially because we don’t really know who we can trust,” explains Ted Jr.
John F. Kennedy Jr. and his friend Stephen Styles-Cooper go to visit Michael in rehab about three weeks into his stay. The abstinence from alcohol may be working, but John Jr. is taken aback that his cousin seems as devoted to his teenage paramour as ever, even producing for them a photo of Marisa, which Michael tells them he’s kept hidden in his sock.
“This is the girl you’re going to hell for?” Stephen Styles-Cooper recalls John Jr. exclaiming, pronouncing her “just a kid” and taking the photo away with them when they leave. On their four-hour-long trip back to New York City, Stephen says John seems “shut down,” remarking, “I couldn’t tell if he was angry, hurt, sad, confused…or what.”
Whatever’s going through his friend’s mind, Stephen is surprised by what happens as they finally part: “[He] looked at me and said three words I never thought I’d hear coming from him: ‘Fucking Kennedy Curse.’”
Chapter 49
By April 1995, Michael is home from rehab and Marisa has moved out of the house—but he and the seventeen-year-old are still seeing each other. Associated Press photos even show her (but not Michael’s wife and kids) at the Kennedy compound on Labor Day 1995, causing John Jr. to reportedly observe, “Aunt Ethel must really be on the warpath.” Still, Vicki and Michael more or less manage to keep their marital problems out of the public eye—but they can’t keep a lid on local gossip.
Especially not when it seems the affair has been an open secret among Marisa’s prep school classmates at Thayer Academy all along. The girl, whom People reports had been named “Most Beautiful” by her fellow students, has apparently been boasting about it throughout high school. “She used to brag all the time about sleeping with the Kennedy guy. But nobody believed her until the stories came out,” scoffs one former classmate. Marisa even “told people she had been caught in bed with him,” another one confirms.
Over the next year, as Michael and the teen continue their relationship, the only people who somehow don’t seem to get wind of the affair are Marisa’s parents, June and Paul Verrochi. By the fall of 1996, however, enough people are talking that friends of the Verrochis finally broach their suspicions directly to June and Paul. When confronted by her parents, Marisa at first denies it…but then admits everything.
According to J. Randy Taraborrelli in his book The Kennedy Heirs, Marisa’s father, Paul, marches directly over to Michael’s office and unloads on him in front of witnesses. “Paul asked me how I could do it,” Michael later tells a family member. “And he kept asking me and asking me and asking me. And the only thing I could think of was that I was sure someone with a heart could’ve answered the question. But that wasn’t me,” he says. Michael’s own estimation of himself is “I’m not normal. I don’t feel things.”
Vicki has had enough, and she and the children move out of the family home.
Marisa starts her freshman year at Boston University and breaks things off with Michael.
Though he tries to change Marisa’s mind, Michael also initially hopes to repair his marriage to Vicki, but by April 1997, the couple announces a separation after sixteen years of marriage.
Yet what seems like a conclusion is only the beginning, since it’s soon after Vicki and Michael’s separation is announced that reporters from the Boston Globe break the salacious affair story. And while it’s no surprise that news of an alleged relationship between a Kennedy and a teenage babysitter is almost immediately picked up across the country, what is surprising is that no one in the Kennedy camp makes much attempt to deny it. There’s a tacit agreement that yes, the affair took place; the only real fight is over when it may have begun (in Massachusetts, the legal age of consent is sixteen).
The press has a field day with this scandal, and Cohasset police launch inquiries into the statutory rape allegations, but true to form, the Kennedys clam up.
As one family friend tells Vanity Fair, “I have a sense that all of the Kennedys are in a castle with a moat around it and a gangplank that lifts up, and they’re all in there with boiling oil for journalists. They’re in a siege mentality all the time, and I think it colors their whole relationship with other people.”
That familial devotion is both admirable and a source of frustration to outsiders, many of whom view loyalty taken to this extent as disrespectful to the victims, even Mafia-esque. “The only time the family intervenes is when there’s an embarrassment in the press,” a close friend of the Kennedys points out. “The infraction is not considered important, only the public embarrassment.”
Even when Joe speaks out on the dual family dramas, it is only to say vaguely, “I view these as private and personal matters,” while acknowledging, “Sometimes in my family it doesn’t always work out that way.” Nevertheless, he states firmly of Michael, “I love my brother very much, I will always love my brother, and I will stand by my brother”—an attitude Vanity Fair deems “Omertà, Irish-American-style.”