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Secret JFK Mistress Breaks Her Silence Almost 60 Years After Assassination

Diana de Vegh described how Kennedy courted her when she was a 20-year-old college student.

Almost 60 years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, an 83-year-old New York woman has broken her silence on an alleged love affair between the two. In a piece for former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s Air Mail, Diana de Vegh wrote how Kennedy courted her in 1958 when she was a 20-year-old student at Radcliffe College. She described in vivid detail how Kennedy, who was married at the time, asked her on a date. “In my closet, my dresses chittered and chattered, fluffing their sleeves and whisking their hems, vying for my attention,” de Vegh wrote. “As I would be vying for his attention, as soon as I saw him again.” The pair continued their affair for years after that, though Kennedy began to get colder as time progressed. It ended a year before his assassination, she wrote.

She told the New York Post that she chose to go public now to encourage other women who are engrossed in relationships with unequal power dynamics. “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, Roger Ailes, show business,” de Vegh said.