Kennedy, 56, a lawyer, author and environmental activist, filed the papers May 12. A day later, police responded to reports of a "domestic incident" at the couple's Bedford, N.Y., home, in which Kennedy said his wife, Mary, had been drinking.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started divorce proceedings against wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, a few days before she was charged with drunken driving, according to court papers.
According to court documents, Mary Kennedy called police herself, was "visibly intoxicated" and told police her husband was "verbally abusive to herself and her children."
Later that week, Mary Kennedy, 50, was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated after she jumped a curb at a school in Bedford. Police said it was obvious she had been drinking. Bedford Police Lt. Jeff Dickan told The New York Post that one officer "smelled alcohol on her breath as she spoke." A breathalyzer revealed that her blood alcohol level was .11, he said. The legal limit is .08.
According to The Journal News report, she is due in court in the small suburban town on July 22.
Kennedy, son of the slain U.S. senator, declined to comment today. He and his wife were married for 16 years and have four children together, Conor, Finn, Kyra, and Aiden Vieques.
This is the second divorce for Kennedy. His first marriage, to Emily Ruth Black, lasted 12 years. Kennedy and Black have two children together.
Kennedy is the third of eleven children born to Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy, the matriarch and patriarch of an iconic family whose lives over the past six decades have been marked by political achievement as well as tragedy.
Last August, Kennedy's aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died at the age of 88. Later that month, his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, died at age 77 of brain cancer, leaving Jean Kennedy Smith as the last surviving member of the family in president John F. Kennedy's generation.
Though Robert Kennedy Jr. has only flirted with the idea of running for political office, he is an outspoken Democrat and has become one of the green movement's most visible supporters. He has been especially vocal about the BP oil spill. I a column in The Huffington Post in May, he blamed the disaster on the "festering ethics of the Bush Administration and "eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil."
Read more at The Journal News.
