"Joe hadn't said a word," Rauch says of Kennedy's petition for an annulment, the so-called Catholic divorce that allows Catholics—some 40,000 per year in the U.S.—to remarry yet remain in the church. "I was amazed." She was also furious. Rauch immediately tried to call Kennedy, but he was in the Caribbean with Kelly. When they finally did speak, they "had words—not particularly amicable or helpful," she says.
Kennedy and Kelly have put off setting a wedding date, pending an annulment. Now Rauch, who was raised an Episcopalian, has begun making it plain that she will fight. "I'm not going to lie in front of God so Joe can have a big Catholic wedding," she told a reporter. Rauch says it's hypocritical that Kennedy now wants to erase a marriage that lasted more than a decade and produced two children, twins Matthew and Joseph III, 12.
"To get an annulment, you have to prove there was never a 'sanctified bond,' " she says. "But we knew each other for nine years before we married. How can [he] suddenly claim there wasn't a bond?"
Rauch says it is the children, who live with her in Cambridge, Mass., who would be most affected. "The children should know that when they came into the world we were really happy," she says. That happiness ended, she says, when in 1986, Kennedy ran for Tip O'Neill's old seat in Congress. "Joe's priorities changed from me, Matt and Joe to the Kennedy legacy," she explains.
"This is not something that should be discussed in public," says Kennedy, through a spokesperson. But Rauch means to be heard. "It's not the first fight your parents have had," she told her boys, "and it's probably not going to be the last."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
