Inside Carolyn Bessette’s Heartbreaking Final Days With JFK Jr.

Carolyn Was Never Left Alone

It wasn’t just posthumously that everyone knew John and Carolyn’s address. She had already moved several times since meeting him in 1992—from the East Village, where she first lived upon moving to New York from Greenwich, Conn., in 1989, to Greenwich Village in 1993 when paparazzi started staking out her apartment, and then to new West Village digs in 1994 after they tracked her down again.

Carolyn moved into John’s Tribeca loft with no doorman and no security at 20 North Moore in 1995.

While John and countless others assured her that the paps would chill out once they were married, the photographers waited outside for her every morning. And by many accounts, the coverage of their relationship—feverish and intrusive as it was before—only got worse.

In the media’s eyes, John had always been a generous public figure as he rollerbladed or bicycled around town, romanced stars like Daryl and Madonna, and accepted press attention as part of his life. So when he asked them to give his girlfriend, and then wife, a break—sometimes with daggers in his eyes, another time jumping on the hood of a photographer’s car—Carolyn ended up blamed for the dip in his tolerance.

As Beller notes, it apparently didn’t occur to the press that John’s hackles were up because he loved Carolyn, who was so obviously distressed, and wanted to protect her.