# Mary Richardson Kennedy

Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy (née Richardson; October 4, 1959 – May 16, 2012) was an American interior designer and philanthropist. She was a proponent of green building and was a co-founder of the Food Allergy Initiative, the largest fund for food allergy research in the United States. Her 2010 legal separation from her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was highly publicized. Her suicide in 2012 also received national media attention.

## Early life

Mary Kathleen Richardson was born on October 4, 1959, and was raised in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her father, John F. Richardson, was an attorney and a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, who died when she was 12 years old. Richardson's mother was Nancy Higgins, a public school English teacher. Richardson had four sisters and two brothers.
She attended The Putney School, where she became friends and roommates with Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. She later roomed with Kerry Kennedy in college and served as her maid of honor at her wedding in 1990 to Andrew Cuomo.

## Education

Richardson attended Brown University and studied architectural design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Her close friend Kerry Kennedy stated that Mary spent a semester working for the artist Andy Warhol in 1980. While Edward Kennedy was running for president, Mary Richardson, then age 20, had raised donations of artwork from Warhol and other prominent artists in his network, including Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Schnabel.

## Career

After studying architecture at RISD, Richardson lived in SoHo, Manhattan, in the 1980s, and was active in the bohemian culture.
In 1993, Richardson worked for the firm Parrish Hadley Design as an architectural designer. She was involved in the renovation of the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, the official residence of the Vice President of the United States. Her work involved green building practices and was certified through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Following flood damage to her home in 2003, Richardson oversaw a massive salvage job and green rebuild project known as the Kennedy Green House Project.
In 1998, she co-founded the Food Allergy Initiative, the largest private fund for food allergy research in the United States.

## Personal life

On April 15, 1994, Richardson married Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the brother of her close friend Kerry Kennedy, aboard a research vessel on the Hudson River. They had four children: Conor, Kyra, Aidan, and William.
During their marriage, Kennedy was widely regarded as a serial philanderer and was known among his friends for sending explicit nude photos of women that they presumed he had taken, according to Vanity Fair. The highly-publicized allegations of sexual assault against Kennedy by the family's then-babysitter, Eliza Cooney, allegedly took place during this period. On May 12, 2010, Kennedy filed for divorce from Richardson. Three days later, she was arrested and charged with driving under the influence. A court ordered that full temporary custody of her children be granted to her estranged husband.

### Death

On May 16, 2012, Richardson was found dead at her home in Bedford, New York. Her death was ruled a suicide by hanging. An autopsy revealed that she had antidepressants in her blood. Before her death, Richardson had discovered Kennedy's personal journal from 2001, in which he recorded sexual encounters with 37 different women. According to Kennedy, Richardson passed the journal along "to her sisters with instructions that, if anything happened to her, [it should be] published in the press".
Her funeral, organized by the Kennedy family, was held at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Bedford. On May 21, 2012, a memorial service organized by the Richardson family was held at the Standard Hotel in Manhattan. A legal battle between her widower and her brother, Thomas W. Richardson, ensued over which family should have control over her remains.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won the court case and buried her beside his aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her husband, Sargent Shriver, at St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Centerville, Massachusetts. Several days later, Kennedy moved Richardson’s remains to an empty plot in the cemetery, and put up a gravestone there. Media at the time reported that Kennedy negotiated to buy fifty plots surrounding Richardson’s grave, and this was confirmed when Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Mary’s niece, was interred beside her in 2019.