The True Story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s Fight in the Park

Tim TeemanFri, February 27, 2026 at 3:10 AM UTC

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The True Story of JFK Jr & CBK’s Fight Eric Liebowitz / FX

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The real-life photographs and video, shot from a blurry distance, show a couple in a New York City park shouting and grabbing at each other, their faces etched with frustration and anger. Later he sits on the sidewalk, head in his hands. Finally, they appear to hug and reconcile.

Now, nearly 30 years to the day, the infamous argument between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette—on February 25, 1996, ravenously reported by the tabloids—has been dramatized in the fifth episode of FX’s Love Story.

Preceding the argument in the TV drama, Kennedy (Paul Anthony Kelly) and Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) are immersed in a public-private squabble over his marriage proposal to her. Kelly Klein (Leila George), the then wife of designer Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola), says Bessette is “smart” to be cautious. “She knows if she marries him that will be her defining characteristic, it will be like she never existed before she met him.”

Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette and Paul Anthony Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. in Love Story. Eric Liebowitz / FX

For Bessette, there is also the stressful omnipresence of paparazzi and an imminent trip to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to spend time with the Kennedys. Elsewhere, Michael J. Berman (Michael Nathanson), who co-founded George magazine with Kennedy, is shown to be angry at the hype around the couple’s relationship; he would like more attention paid to the publication’s imminent launch. However, the launch of George was in September 1995 and the fight took place in February 1996 (not the day after the launch as the drama has it). Also imagined: the battery of hurt and deeply personal insults Kennedy and Bessette hurl at one another. However, both TV drama and tabloid reports have JFK Jr. trying to wrest Carolyn’s engagement ring from her finger.

If historical truth remains murky, sartorial accuracy remains resolutely on-point. Kennedy is shown in a pair of maroon-colored shorts with Bessette in a white woolen sweater and navy-blue anorak—their clothes, and the physicality of the encounter, are a faithful rendering from photographs and video.

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Executive producer Brad Simpson tells T&C, “We had to make decisions of what to leave in and what to put out. And there’s also competing historical ideas. But we know that they had this huge fight in the park. It’s one of the most well-documented fights ever, but we had to imagine—the writers, Connor [Hines] and Kim Rosenstock—what was said in that fight based on where they were in their life.”

The real-life fight Kennedy and Bessette had in Battery Park in 1996 is dramatized in the fifth episode of Love Storyi. Eric Liebowitz / FX

The cause of the fight and others “stemmed from Carolyn’s ongoing complaint that John let people walk all over him,” Kennedy’s friend Steven M. Gillon wrote in his 2019 biography America’s Reluctant Prince.

Kennedy’s Chief of Staff at George, RoseMarie Terenzio, told Gillon that Berman was “furious” Kennedy hadn’t told him about the fight before its airing in the tabloids. “How could you be so stupid?” Berman reportedly blasted Kennedy. “You’re trying to do a political magazine and you’re having a fight with your girlfriend in the park.”

As reported by InStyle, Gillon wrote that the impetus of the fight had been a wedding Bessette and Kennedy attended where they were seated next to the society editor of The New York Times. “Carolyn surmised instantly that the bride wanted to get the Times to cover her wedding and was dangling John as incentive,” Gillon said. “She was furious at John for not making a statement by walking out.”

Gillon went on, “Carolyn, more than anyone who John had been with, would stand up to and confront him, and I think that John to an extent needed that.”

Kennedy later told Howard Stern that the confrontation had been “a silly argument.” Indeed, he and Bessette wed in September 1996 in a private ceremony on Georgia’s Cumberland Island (also dramatized in a future episode). That day, like the park fight and so much about the couple—including the plane crash in 1999 that killed them and her sister Lauren—remain shrouded in mystery.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”