JFK ‘used to groom girls like Weinstein’
Ex-mistress tells of being lured into affair when she was student aged 20
One of John F Kennedy’s former mistresses has broken her silence after 63 years and compared him with Harvey Weinstein.
Diana de Vegh, 83, said that the former president used the same tactics as the disgraced Hollywood producer, who was convicted of rape last year.
She told how Mr Kennedy effectively said to her ‘You go to bed with me, I’ll make you special’ when they met in 1958. At the time, she was 20 and he was 40 – and married.
Miss de Vegh, now a grandmother of two, said she has decided to speak out because the MeToo movement had caused her to reassess her view of the relationship. She said: ‘For a great man, he was still in the throes of the male mythology of his time: See pretty young woman, have pretty young woman.’
She met Mr Kennedy when she was at college and he was giving a speech in Boston for his senatorial re-election campaign.
He came to her table and said: ‘Give me your seat, so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl.’
Miss de Vegh, who still runs a psychotherapy practice from her Manhattan apartment, said: ‘I didn’t realise then that I’d simply been netted, separated from the other students. I was 20 years old, with a full supply of hormones and madly in love with this compelling man.’
She told the new York Post: ‘The whole idea of conferred specialness, “You go to bed with me, I’ll make you special” – we’ve seen a lot of that with Harvey Weinstein, [former Fox news boss] Roger Ailes, show business.’
Their affair lasted four years. The future president’s staff would call her ‘sweetheart’ and keep her at an ‘inconspicuous’ distance from Mr Kennedy, so as not to arouse suspicion. When alone Mr Kennedy would joke to her: ‘You know I’m working pretty hard for just one vote here.’
They would make love in an apartment Mr Kennedy kept in Boston and in the Carlyle Hotel on new York’s Upper east Side.
She said she was in ‘full moviestar-infatuation mode’ as her lover became president. She moved to Washington to be nearer him.
The relationship came to an end in 1962 when JFK found out that Miss de Vegh’s father was a Hungarian economist he had recently begun consulting on political affairs.
In interviews with the new York Post and Graydon Carter’s Airmail newsletter, she said Mr Kennedy ‘realised it could really be a problem, because a lot of people knew my dad, but he couldn’t just drop me, so we had to kind of dwindle’.
When Mr Kennedy was assassinated the following year Miss de Vegh said that she ‘just went completely numb’. Mr Kennedy is said to have had flings with dozens of women while in office.