Even in Death, Women Still Get Hit Pieces Written About Them. It Just Happened to Carolyn Bessette.
FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette has consumed the TV world, making stars out of its lead actors and sparking a whole new cycle of Kennedy discourse. The veil between how the private and very public sides of Kennedy dynasty has transfixed the world for generations… but a new attempt at the “truth” might be taking it way too far.
Over the weekend, The Daily Mail posted a piece by columnist Maureen Callahan, author of the 2024 book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed. In a way, the title of the piece says it all: “The REAL Carolyn Bessette was a violent, deeply disturbed coke head with a humiliation fetish. The lies must stop. Her friends are telling the truth… and it’s ugly.”
The article is paywalled behind the outlet’s DailyMail+ service, and is far from the first time that Callahan has written and spoken about Bessette since Love Story debuted, previously chronicling her alleged “truly ruthless plot to snare JFK Jr… and secret betrayals she took to her grave.” But either way, the sentiment behind the article has been dragged pretty ruthlessly online.
The ethics of Callahan’s piece have been called into question, since Bessette has been dead since 1999 and unable to defend herself against any of the allegations within. But even beyond that, the Internet has had a lot of fun with the optics of the piece. For one thing, it was published on the same weekend as International Women’s Day, making the general cattiness and gossipy nature of the piece look even worse.
You’re Only Making Her More Iconic…
And beyond that, the specific accusations Callahan leverages in the headline are being… reinterpreted in our current moment, for lack of a better term. The idea of Bessette being a “violent, deeply disturbed coke head” isn’t as universal of a taboo as it might have been years prior, as some have argued that it makes her even more iconic and is “a compliment, borderline mythologizing.” It’s the kind of thing that provokes a Lucille Bluth-style delivery of “Good for her!” It’s also the kind of thing that has made multiple people actually want to tune into Love Story, counteracting the point of the piece to begin with. As one tweet eloquently puts it: “How bad of a bitch do you need to be to get a posthumous hit piece written about you? Inspiring.”
There is a conversation worth having about how the popularity of Love Story has led people to have an interesting disconnect in how they view Bessette. As women have swarmed the New York corner store she used to buy her accessories from, and attempted to recreate her outfits with whatever fast fashion pieces they can quickly get their hands on, a discourse has spun out. I have, personally, encountered countless TikToks in recent weeks about how Bessette isn’t the “clean girl” or “tradwife” symbol that some have recently tried to idolize her as. She was proudly left-leaning, she didn’t tolerate nonsense from men, and she intentionally curated her personal style instead of just following trends… pieces of wisdom that these Tiktoks hope to impart on the people who are oversimplifying or fully misunderstanding her legacy.
But at the same time, we can have a conversation about who Bessette really was, and the larger historical inaccuracies of Love Story, without venturing into petty slander. Callahan’s piece doesn’t seem to understand that, and would rather attempt to drag a dead woman through the proverbial mud for the sake of clicks. It’s petty and unnecessary… but at least it’s resulting in a mini “Streisand effect” along the way.
(featured image: Tyler Mallory/Liaison)
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