Every Woman Robert Kennedy Had an Affair With ht
When Ethel Kennedy stood beside her husband at campaign rallies, photographers captured what looked like the perfect political marriage, she smiled for the cameras, held his hand during speeches, raised 11 children while he built a legacy. But here’s what those photos never showed. Ethel knew. She knew about the Hollywood actresses.
She knew about the family friends. She knew about affairs that would make most women pack their bags and never look back. And the worst part, she knew before she even married him. Robert F. Kennedy didn’t just cheat once or twice. He carried on multiple affairs throughout their marriage, and his wife was aware of every single one.
From legendary film stars to close family friends, even his own sister-in-law, Bobby’s infidelities were an open secret. Yet, Ethel stayed. She raised their massive family. She turned a blind eye to betrayal after betrayal. The question isn’t just who Bobby cheated with. It’s why Ethel chose to endure it all.
And by the end of this video, you’ll understand that the truth is far more complicated than you think. Let’s start at the beginning because Ethel’s story doesn’t begin with betrayal. It begins with a choice. She grew up as Ethel Skakel, daughter of a wealthy family, and she met the Kennedys through their social circles. This wasn’t some naive young woman stumbling into a toxic situation.
She knew exactly what she was getting into. The Kennedys had a reputation. Everyone in their orbit understood that fidelity wasn’t exactly a family value. Joseph Kennedy Senior, the patriarch, modeled this behavior for his sons. He had his own affairs, conducted them openly enough that everyone knew, and he passed that attitude down to his children like an inheritance.
Infidelity was practically written into the Kennedy playbook. If you wanted to marry into this dynasty, you accepted certain unspoken rules. Keep your mouth shut. Maintain appearances. Never make it a public scandal. Smile for the cameras no matter what’s happening behind closed doors. Ethel fell in love with Bobby anyway. They married on June 17th, 1950 when she was young enough to believe love could overcome anything.
And according to those who knew her, she genuinely adored him. One biography describes her as loving him more completely than she ever dreamed possible. That kind of intense love can make you tolerate things you never thought you would. It can make you rationalize behavior that would be unacceptable in any other context.
But before we get to Bobby’s affairs, there’s something you need to understand about his first experience because it sets the tone for everything that followed. According to biographer Larry Tai, Bobby’s father actually paid for him to visit a brothel in Harlem when he was just 21 years old. Joseph Kennedy arranged for his son to sleep with an African-American woman, essentially buying his son’s sexual initiation like it was some kind of coming of age ritual.
Afterward, Bobby’s assessment was remarkably cold and detached. He said it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t particularly fabulous either, like he was reviewing a restaurant meal instead of describing an intimate human experience. That casual dismissiveness, that transactional view of tells you something important about how Bobby would approach relationships for the rest of his life.
One year later, he married Ethel. She was 22. By 1951, they welcomed their first child. They would eventually have 11 kids together, which sounds like the foundation of a strong family unit, and in some ways it was. But somewhere in those years of building a family, maintaining a political career, climbing the ladder from attorney general to senator, and playing the role of Kennedy Golden Boy, Bobby found time for other women, lots of other women.
The pattern started early and never really stopped. And Ethel, despite knowing, despite the humiliation, despite raising nearly a dozen children who needed stable parents, chose to stay. Which brings us to the women themselves. Bobby’s taste in extrammarital partners often leaned toward Hollywood. These weren’t random flings with women he met at bars.
These were calculated affairs with some of the most famous women in America. And somehow Ethel knew about them while the rest of the country remained mostly in the dark. Kim Novak was one of them. If you’re not familiar with old Hollywood, Novak was a massive star in the 1950s. She signed with Columbia Pictures in 1954 and became one of Hollywood’s top box office draws.
We’re talking major films like Picnic, Pal Joey, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She was the kind of actress who defined an era, the type of woman who made men nervous and women envious. The affair allegedly happened in 1961, right when Bobby was serving as attorney general under his brother’s administration. Think about the risk there. He wasn’t some private citizen.
He was one of the most powerful men in the country, second only to the president, and he was carrying on with a Hollywood icon. Details about their relationship are scarce, which is typical for these Kennedy situations. The family got very good at keeping secrets, but multiple sources confirm they were involved, at least briefly.
Novak later withdrew from Hollywood almost entirely, which always seems strange given how successful she was. She married twice, eventually settling in Oregon with an ecquin veterinarian named Robert Mallaloy. They lived in a log cabin together until his death in 2020. She never talked publicly about Bobby, but the whispers never really stopped.
Hollywood has a long memory. Then there was Lee Remick. This actress earned an Academy Award nomination for her role in Days of Wine and Roses. She won a Tony for Wait Until Dark on Broadway. She appeared in classics like Anatomy of a Murder in the Omen. She was talented, beautiful, and married to her first husband, Bill Collerin, when she allegedly became involved with Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s.
Remick’s affair with Bobby supposedly happened while she was still raising two children with her producer husband. The timeline overlaps with some of her biggest career moments, which makes you wonder how she balanced it all. Secret meetings with the attorney general while filming major movies and maintaining the appearance of a happy marriage.
It’s exhausting just thinking about it. She later married British producer William Rory Gowens in 1970 and stayed with him until her death from kidney cancer in 1991. She was only 55. Like Novak, she never confirmed the affair publicly. But people close to both families knew. They always knew. But here’s where it gets really messy.
Because Claudine Long wasn’t just some Hollywood starlet Bobby met at a party. She was married to Andy Williams, the famous singer and television host. And the two couples were close friends, not acquaintances, not people who ran in the same circles and occasionally crossed paths. Close friends.
They took summer cruises together on the Salmon River. They visited each other’s homes in Bair, Palm Springs, New York City, and Hickory Hill, Virginia. The kids played together. The wives chatted about family life. The husbands discussed politics and entertainment. They were the kind of friends who spent holidays together.
Think about that dynamic for a second. Bobby and Ethel would spend weekends with Andy and Claudine. They’d have dinner, go boating, swim in pools, act like two happy couples enjoying their success and good fortune. And sometime in 1967, Bobby and Claudine crossed a line that should never have been crossed. The affair allegedly happened that year right under everyone’s noses, though it didn’t last long.
When Bobby was shot at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5th, 1968, both Long and Williams rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital with the Kennedys. They stood vigil as doctors tried to save his life. Bobby died early the next morning with his family and friends surrounding him. Later, Lonj and Williams named their son Robert in his memory, which raises an uncomfortable question.
Did Andy Williams know about the affair? And if he didn’t, how did Ethel feel standing beside the woman who’d slept with her husband? All of them grieving together. All of them acting like their friendship had never been tainted. The level of deception required to maintain those relationships is almost unfathomable. For years, people whispered about Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
The rumors seemed almost too scandalous to be true. A sitting attorney general involved with the most famous actress in the world. It sounded like tabloid fiction. Then a letter surfaced that changed everything. The letter was two pages long, written by Jean Kennedy Smith, Bobby and JFK’s sister.
She wrote it sometime in the early 1960s. And in it, she expressed genuine delight that her brother Bobby and Monroe were a hot new item. She even suggested that Monroe should come with Kennedy when he returned to the East Coast, like she was encouraging a promising new romance. This wasn’t speculation from a tabloid. This wasn’t a rumor spread by Kennedy enemies.
This was his own sister acknowledging the affair in writing, treating it like it was perfectly normal for her married brother to be involved with another woman. Photographs exist of Bobby and Marilyn at various events together. They’re standing close, laughing, looking comfortable with each other in a way that suggests familiarity beyond casual acquaintance.
But here’s the moment that apparently pushed Ethel to her limit. At JFK’s notorious 45th birthday party in 1962, Marilyn sang that famous sultry version of Happy Birthday. Everyone remembers that performance. The skintight dress, the breathy voice, the way she made Happy Birthday sound like a seduction. It’s one of the most iconic moments in American pop culture history.
What people don’t talk about as much is what happened afterward at the party. According to Lou Harris, who was in attendance that night, Marilyn put the moves on Bobby right in front of everyone. He described her literally pinning Bobby against the wall, being physically aggressive in her flirtation, making it obvious to everyone watching that something was going on between them, and Ethel watched it happen.
She stood there with a drink in her hand, watching another woman openly pursue her husband, while hundreds of people pretended not to notice. She was so furious that she left the party immediately, telling people that what happened she just witnessed was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen. Most wives would have demanded a divorce right there.
Most women would have made a scene, confronted both Bobby and Marilyn, refused to participate in this humiliating charade any longer. Ethel went home angry, but she didn’t leave. She never left. She swallowed her rage, maintained her composure, and continued playing the role of devoted wife. The exact nature of Bobby and Marilyn’s relationship remains somewhat unclear.
There’s no concrete proof of how far things went physically. Bobby certainly wasn’t the type to document his affairs, and Monroe died before she could write any tell all memoir. But the letter from his sister, the photographs, the birthday party incident, the fact that multiple people from that era confirm they were involved, it all adds up to something more than friendship.
And Monroe died just months later in August 1962 under mysterious circumstances, which only added fuel to the speculation. Some conspiracy theories even suggest the Kennedys were somehow involved in her death, though there’s no credible evidence for that. What is clear is that Marilyn knew too much, had gotten too close, and was becoming a liability.
Her death conveniently eliminated a problem that could have destroyed the Kennedy political machine, the ultimate betrayal that lasted 4 years. If affairs with Hollywood actresses were painful, what came next was absolutely devastating. Because Bobby’s longest and most significant affair wasn’t with a stranger.
It wasn’t with someone Ethel had never met. It was with Jackie Kennedy, his own sister-in-law, the widow of his murdered brother, the first lady of the United States. After JFK’s assassination in November 1963, Bobby fell apart completely. He wasn’t just grieving in the normal sense. He had what would today be diagnosed as a complete nervous breakdown.
He built a literal shrine to his brother in his office filled with photos and books and reminders of everything they’d lost. He wore JFK’s bomber jacket with the presidential seal emlazed on it like some kind of protective talisman. He drove to Arlington National Cemetery twice a day to visit the grave as if his brother might somehow still be there, as if staring at the eternal flame would bring him back.
Bobby chewed his nails down to the quick until his fingers bled. He lost tremendous amounts of weight, looking gaunt and holloweyed in photographs from that period. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. He was haunted by an old injury that never fully healed. The pain a constant physical reminder of loss.
And in his grief, drowning in depression and guilt and rage at the world, he sought comfort in the worst possible place. He turned to Jackie. The affair allegedly began shortly after the assassination and lasted 4 years. 4 years. This wasn’t a brief moment of weakness. This wasn’t two people seeking comfort in the immediate aftermath of trauma.
This was a sustained relationship that everyone in the Kennedy family knew about and chose to ignore. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who served as JFK’s under secretary of commerce and knew the family intimately, later said that Bobby and Jackie carried on like lovesick teenagers. They weren’t discreet. They weren’t careful. They acted like a couple in love right in front of Ethel, right in front of Bobby’s 11 children, right in front of everyone who was supposed to matter.
Roosevelt speculated that Bobby probably would have divorced Ethel to marry Jackie if it had been politically and religiously possible, but of course it wasn’t. The Kennedys were Catholic. Divorce would have destroyed Bobby’s political future, eliminated any chance he had of running for president himself and marrying his brother’s widow.
That would have been scandalous beyond redemption. So, the affair continued in secret, hidden from the public, but known to everyone close to them. When Bobby was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 after winning the California Democratic primary, one source claims that Jackie was the one who instructed doctors to end life support, not Ethel, not his wife of 18 years and mother of his 11 children.
Jackie made that decision, which tells you exactly who held power in Bobby’s heart at the end. Think about what that moment must have been like for Ethel. Her husband is dying. She’s surrounded by his children. All of them crying. All of them looking to her for strength. And the woman who’s been sleeping with her husband for four years is the one making life and death decisions.
The woman who betrayed her, who destroyed any chance of real intimacy in her marriage, is acting like Bobby’s primary next of kin. Ethel stood there with Bobby’s kids and the rest of the Kennedy family. All of them fully aware that her husband had been in love with another woman for years. And still she didn’t speak out.
She maintained her dignity, grieved publicly as the devoted wife, and protected his legacy like nothing had ever happened. So here’s the question everyone asks. Why did Ethel stay? Why endure decades of humiliation, betrayal, and public embarrassment? Why raise 11 children in a marriage that was fundamentally broken? Why protect a man who clearly didn’t respect her enough to remain faithful? The simple answer is that she loved him.
That biography that described her love for Bobby as more complete than she ever dreamed possible wasn’t exaggerating. She genuinely adored this man, flaws and all. Some people love so deeply that they convince themselves enduring pain is worth it. They tell themselves that the good moments outweigh the bad. That the family they built together matters more than fidelity. That love means sacrifice.
But there’s more to it than love. Ethel married into the Kennedy dynasty. That came with power, prestige, and a platform most people never get. She was Ethel Kennedy, wife of the attorney general, wife of a senator, potential future first lady. She had access to the most influential people in America. She could affect real change on issues she cared about.
She had a voice that mattered. Divorcing Bobby would have meant losing all of that. She would have been cast out, labeled as the woman who couldn’t handle being a Kennedy wife. She would have become a footnote defined forever by her failure to keep her husband satisfied. Her social standing would have evaporated. The doors that had opened for her would have slammed shut and her children would have grown up in a broken home, which in the 1960s carried serious social stigma.
There’s also the matter of those 11 kids. When you have that many children, you don’t just walk away easily. Ethel prioritized stability for them over her own hurt feelings. She chose to keep the family intact, even if that family was built on lies. She wanted them to have two parents at home to maintain their privileged lifestyle, to grow up as Kennedys with all the advantages that name provided.
And then there’s the Kennedy Code. Everyone in that family understood that you protect the dynasty above all else. You don’t air dirty laundry. You don’t create scandals that damage the political brand. You circle the wagons, present a united front, and never let outsiders see the dysfunction festering beneath the surface.
Ethel knew that speaking out would destroy everything Bobby was trying to build, his political career, his legacy, his children’s futures. So, she stayed quiet, played the role she was expected to play, and suffered in silence. After Bobby’s assassination in 1968, Ethel had another choice to make. She could have written a tell- all book.
She could have exposed all his affairs, named names, destroyed the carefully crafted Kennedy mythology. Publishers would have paid millions. The book would have been a bestseller. She could have gotten revenge, cleared her conscience, and profited from her pain. Instead, she spent the rest of her life protecting his legacy.
She raised their children alone. She stayed involved in social causes Bobby had cared about. She attended Kennedy family gatherings, maintained relationships with the very people who’d betrayed her, and never spoke publicly about what she’d endured. She lived until 2024, carrying those secrets for 56 years after his death. Some people call that strength.
Others might call it something else entirely. But Ethel Kennedy made a calculated decision about what mattered most to her. She chose legacy over truth, family over personal dignity, silence over justice. She decided that being a Kennedy, even a betrayed and humiliated Kennedy, was better than being nothing at all.
The Kennedy brothers are remembered as American political royalty. Their affairs are footnotes whispered about, but rarely examined in detail. Bobby is celebrated as a champion of civil rights, a voice for the poor, a political martyr cut down before he could fulfill his potential. And that’s exactly how Ethel wanted it.
She paid the price for their immortality, one affair at a time, with a smile plastered on her face for the cameras. Whether you see her as a victim or a collaborator probably depends on what you value most. Was she a woman trapped by circumstances beyond her control? Or did she enable Bobby’s behavior by refusing to establish boundaries? Did she sacrifice herself for her children’s well-being? Or did she value status and power more than self-respect? There’s no easy answer.
But one thing is certain, she knew. From the moment she married him until the day she died, she knew exactly what kind of man Bobby Kennedy was. She knew about the brothel visit his father arranged. She knew about Kim Novak, Lee Remick, and Claudine Long. She knew about Marilyn Monroe pinning him against a wall at JFK’s birthday party.
She knew about the four-year affair with Jackie that should have been unforgivable, and she chose to stay anyway. That’s the real story. Not who Bobby cheated with, but why Ethel decided that being Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy was worth more than her own happiness, her own dignity, her own peace of mind.
She made that choice over and over again for decades. And she took that choice to her grave without ever publicly regretting it.