A new biography of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped on April 14 and it draws from something most biographers don't get access to — the subject's own private diaries.

Investigative journalist Isabel Vincent wrote RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise using journals Kennedy kept daily between 1999 and 2001. Those journals ended up in the possession of his second wife Mary Richardson Kennedy, who reportedly held onto them as leverage during their divorce. Mary died by suicide in 2012 before the divorce was finalized. A year later, a source shared the journals with Vincent.

What's in them is genuinely something.

The List and the Rating System

Kennedy had a word for the days he didn't cheat on his wife — "victories." The days he did were called "muggings." And he tracked all of it in his journal with a numbering system of his own design. A 10 meant intercourse. Lower numbers indicated a range of other conduct. Names were attached — first names mostly, full names if the woman was "socially significant."

"Like the fish he caught and the money he made, Kennedy kept a list of the women he had bedded," Vincent writes.

He described his ongoing battle with what he called his "lust demons" with a self-awareness that didn't seem to translate into actually stopping. In one entry he wrote about feeling his deceased father watching him — and feeling like he was disappointing him "when I told a lie, had a sexual thought, got a bad grade."

Vincent declined to name any of the women in the diaries. Kennedy himself has previously acknowledged he has "many skeletons in his closet" — a quote that is aging remarkably well in light of these revelations. He's currently married to actress Cheryl Hines, his third wife, who wrote in her own recent book that she and Kennedy "laid it all on the table" after the latest round of allegations.

The Raccoon

This is the sentence nobody expected to read.

In a November 2001 diary entry, Kennedy describes pulling his minivan over on I-684, getting out, and cutting the penis off a dead raccoon on the side of the highway while his wife and kids waited in the car.

"I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be," he wrote.

He took the genitals to study later, according to Vincent.

This joins an already substantial catalog of Kennedy animal stories — dumping a dead bear in Central Park to make it look like a bicycle accident, beheading a whale near the Kennedy family compound, allegedly grinding up baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed his hawks. That last one was alleged by his cousin Caroline Kennedy ahead of his Senate confirmation hearings.

"I've been picking up roadkill my whole life. I have a freezer full of it," Kennedy told reporters in 2024.

The Epstein Flights

Kennedy flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane twice according to the biography — once with Mary to Palm Beach to visit his mother Ethel Kennedy, and once to South Dakota for a fossil hunting trip with Mary and his kids. At the time of the first flight he was still legally married to his first wife Emily Black, though he referred to Mary as his wife in the diary entry.

He also worked out of an office Epstein loaned him on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, according to a separate 2021 memoir. Ghislaine Maxwell and Mary were reportedly friends.

The Grief

Not everything in the diaries is darkly comic. The summer of 1999 hit Kennedy hard — four funerals in a matter of months, including his cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. and JFK Jr.'s wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy after their plane crash.

One diary entry describes Kennedy walking to the end of a dock at Hyannis Port late at night and noticing lights on at John's empty house. He walked over half expecting to find his cousin there. Instead he found an old harpoon they used to use together.

"This is all that's left here — the ghosts," he wrote.

Vincent told the outlet that the grief sections of the diary are genuinely moving — Kennedy using a Tennyson quote, describing his whole world falling apart. Whatever else is in these journals, there's a real person underneath all of it.

Mary's Story

The biography also details the painful final years of Mary Richardson Kennedy's life — a divorce she didn't want, sobriety struggles after a DUI, allegations leveled against her by Kennedy, and isolation from the Kennedy family. She reportedly pored over his diaries in her final years.

Hours after her body was found, her sister Nan Richardson confronted Kennedy directly.

"You have killed my sister," she told him.

No suicide note was ever publicly confirmed.

Regardless of what is speculated from all of this, one thing is for sure — these private diaries were never meant to see the light of day. RFK Jr. probably wishes they still hadn't.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.

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