Amid his senate confirmation hearings in January 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disastrous divorce from his second wife, Mary Richardson, was thrust into the spotlight once again. Their messy split became the focus of public attention with the release of clandestinely recorded audiotapes and a previously unfiled affidavit written by Richardson in 2012, shortly before her death by suicide that May. The private conversations and stark accusations paint a damning portrait of Kennedy’s troubled marriage and eventual divorce from Richardson, who was also the mother of four of RFK Jr.’s six children.

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According to a revealing exposé by Mother Jones, the controversial politician secretly recorded over 60 conversations with Richardson in total. In one such recording, Kennedy’s estranged wife confronts him about several affairs that she’d learned about, and he attempts to reframe his actions and blame Richardson for his infidelity instead. Kennedy argued, “I want to be in a monogamous relationship. I don’t want to be in a polygamous relationship. I think that’s wrong.” When asked why he spent a decade having affairs if he felt that way, Kennedy responded, “I did it because I was being abused at home.”

The former couple had a bitter custody battle. Richardson wrote a draft of an affidavit that was ultimately not filed with the court in which she accused RFK Jr. of being a “sexual deviant” and of manipulating people. “He re-jiggers the facts, or makes them up, and rushes to tell as many people as he can so that is the version of reality that gets distributed in people’s minds,” Richardson wrote at the time, adding simply, “Classic gaslighting.”

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Mary Richardson’s accusations of infidelity reportedly stemmed from her discovery of a secret diary that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kept, in which he recorded and documented his sexual liaisons with multiple women during their marriage. The dense, nearly 400-page-long red journal even gave a sort of score to each of the women. According to the New York Post, which reviewed a copy in September 2013, Kennedy had a list of 37 women’s names with a score of 1 through 10 next to each of them. Apparently, this reflected how far he’d got with each woman, with a “10” indicating full sexual intercourse. Out of the 37 names, 16 were marked with a “10.”

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The journal — which also included RFK Jr.’s thoughts, his speeches, his political ideologies, and other emotional musings — documents the controversial politician’s numerous dalliances over the years, with November 13, 2001, being a particularly eventful day. Kennedy apparently had romantic interactions with three different women that day, with accompanying scores of 10, 3, and 2 accordingly. During that month alone, Kennedy had 22 different dealings with the same woman, 13 of which were all in a row.

However, the divisive politician seemingly expressed guilt and remorse over his actions, acknowledging that his “lust demons” were his biggest failing as a man. In the journal, Kennedy also painted himself as a victim in many cases, placing the blame for his infidelity on the women he cheated with who “mugged” him, aka led him astray. “I narrowly escaped being mugged by a double team of [two women]. It was tempting but I prayed and God gave me the strength to say no,” RFK Jr. wrote of one such incident in February 2001.

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