Actress Cheryl Hines has refuted a claim that one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughters moved in with her in Los Angeles months before RFK’s estranged wife took her own life in 2012.
Hines, 60, married Kennedy, 72, in 2014 after three years of dating. It was the third marriage for RFK Jr. and the second for the Curb Your Enthusiasm star.
The two had been introduced by Larry David, Hines’ on-screen husband, at a fundraiser in 2006 when both were married to someone else.
Kennedy married his second wife, architect and designer Mary Richardson, in 1994. She was the mother of four of his six children. Hines filed for divorce from her first husband, businessman Paul Young, in July 2010.
Anti-vaxxer Kennedy filed for divorce from Richardson in May 2010 and the next year began dating Hines as the messy split was hammered out by lawyers. Richardson took her own life on May 16, 2012, aged 52. She was found by Kennedy and one of her friends at the family’s home in Bedford, New York.
But an explosive new biography by Isabel Vincent, RFK, Jr.: The Fall and Rise, claims that Richardson and Kennedy’s then-teenage daughter Kyra actually moved to Los Angeles to live with Hines “several months” before her mother’s suicide.
In a passage from the new book seen by the Daily Beast, Vincent quotes an unnamed friend of Richardson who said Kyra moved to California to live in Hines’ house in the fall of 2011, a situation that reportedly left Mary “completely shattered.”
But Ann Gurrola, a representative for Hines, told People, “Kyra Kennedy moved in with Cheryl after Mary passed. Not when she was alive. She did not move into Cheryl’s house when Mary was still alive. The way it’s been painted is incorrect.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Hines’ representative for comment.
Hines discussed Kennedy’s daughter living with her in her own memoir, Unscripted, which was released last November.
“I had developed a special friendship with Bobby’s 16-year-old daughter Kyra,” Hines wrote in her book. “Kyra was struggling in school, and Bobby asked if I would consider allowing her to live at my house while she attended school in Los Angeles. I loved Kyra and was happy to take her in.”
Kyra Kennedy, who is now known as a New York model and fashion influencer, was born on Aug. 22, 1995, which means she was 16 years old during the entire period in question.
Vincent’s biography also details the turbulent breakdown of Kennedy’s marriage to Richardson, using the politician’s secret journals.
The author told host Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast Podcast she obtained Kennedy’s personal diaries from a “trusted source” who knew Mary, and that the documents had been kept “hostage” by his second wife as their divorce festered.
In the diaries Vincent has seen, Kennedy, who was a jet-setting environmental lawyer at the time, details his struggle to not cheat on Richardson, including even congratulating himself for making it through one trip without giving in to temptation.
“I made it through a difficult week without acting out,” he wrote during a visit to the Hamptons in the summer of 1999, according to Vincent. “I am proud of myself because the Sirens were on every rock out there.”
Vincent told Coles she was frustrated by how Kennedy addressed his serial infidelity in the diaries.
“I mean, he talks about it... but he doesn’t take responsibility for it, which drove me crazy,” Vincent said. “When I was reading them, he talks about it being the fault of the women. Women were ‘mugging’ him. That was his term for seduction. You know, he was this helpless victim.”
If you or a loved one are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.
