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Jackie Kennedy was hospitalized with an eating disorder and left fighting for her life
Jackie Kennedy battled an eating disorder that left her hospitalized and fighting for her life, a new book reveals.
In 'Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed', DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan details Jackie's many health battles from 'disordered eating' to PTSD after her husband President John F Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and a series of lost pregnancies.
While married to her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, Jackie 'lost 24 pounds in nine days, started having panic attacks and could barely stand up,' Callahan writes, adding: 'She wound up in the hospital.'
Jackie Kennedy battled an eating disorder that left her hospitalized and fighting for her life, a new book reveals.
In 'Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed', DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan details Jackie's many health battles from 'disordered eating' to PTSD after her husband President John F Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and a series of lost pregnancies.
The extreme weight-loss was apparently prompted by a National Enquirer front page featuring a picture of Jackie with her belly 'looking distended'. The Enquirer headline read: 'Is she or isn't she expecting?'
'Always fanatical about her weight... Jackie went on a crash starvation diet,' Callahan writes. 'Each day, she allowed herself just half a grapefruit, a little yogurt, 2½ ounces of meat, one apple, 3½ ounces of green vegetables, and a salad without dressing.'
'Ask Not' is being exclusively serialized by the Mail in a major series. Among Callahan's many stunning revelations are details of Jackie's private health problems.
In her ten years of marriage to JFK, who was serially unfaithful, Jackie had multiple miscarriages. She also suffered a third-trimester stillbirth and her son Patrick died at just two days old in 1963, months before JFK's assassination in Dallas.
Jackie's pregnancy troubles were, Callahan reveals, 'likely caused by all the sexually transmitted diseases — asymptomatic chlamydia among them — that Jack had passed to her.'
Left untreated or contracted recurrently, chlamydia can cause infertility.
Jackie also suffered with intense depression. But 'Jack either couldn't see it – or didn't care,' Callahan writes. 'Instead, he secretly packed off his wife to a mental hospital for the elite, Valleyhead in Massachusetts, where she had three rounds of electroshock therapy in one week.'
Years after JFK's death, Jackie was also diagnosed with PTSD. 'Her trauma not only stemmed from that day in Dallas, but also from her marriage to Jack — the constant infidelities,' Callahan writes.
The assassination also had a psychical impact on Jackie. Even years later, she 'suffered excruciating, pulsating pain in her neck', Callahan writes. Jackie believed this was due to 'permanent nerve damage from clutching [JFK's] shattered head in her lap' after he was shot.