Friends fear troubled Joan Kennedy will return to the bottle after a vicious war broke out in the famous family, The National ENQUIRER has learned!
Patrick Kennedy — the youngest son of Joan and the late Senator Ted Kennedy — has created a firestorm by exposing the family’s struggles with alcohol and mental-health issues in a new tell-all book.
“Patrick’s airing all of the family dirt!” a source told The ENQUIRER. “It’s embarrassing to Joan — and to everyone else in the family! But Joan is the most fragile — and there’s worry she’ll reach for the bottle in response!”
In his book “A Common Struggle,” former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick, 48, details how he and his sister Kara — who died of a heart attack at the age of 51 in 2011 — and brother Ted Jr., 54, were so concerned about their father’s notorious drinking that they staged an intervention in 1991.
“We think you’re drinking too much,” Ted’s children told him. “Then we all cried.”
But Ted Sr. didn’t want to hear it — and told them he felt they were siding with “those people” outside of the family, then stormed out of the room.
“He took it the exact opposite way we had hoped,” Patrick writes of his father, who died of brain cancer in 2009.
Patrick, who has struggled with his own addiction issues, also said his relationship with Ted Sr. became so frayed that his father refused to let him stay with him when he was in Washington or his home state of Massachusetts!
Patrick confessed his mother Joan, 79, suffered from a “dark, disabling alcoholism,” was in and out of rehab and spent most her time drinking in her room alone.
Joan was arrested for driving under the influence in 1974, 1991 and 2000, and in March 2005 was found passed out on a Boston sidewalk.
In June 2005 her estate and personal affairs were put under the charge of two trustees.
Patrick also said his father berated him for going public with his addiction after he crashed his car into a barricade near the U.S. Capitol in 2006 while on prescription drugs!
