Hope Bielat runs and wins.
btw for those wondering why this kid is Joe III and why his father isn’t, it’s kind of weird but this is how they treated it:
Joe Kennedy Sr—the patriarch
Joe Kennedy Jr—son, killed in war when bomb in his plane
prematurely exploded
Joe Kennedy II—son of RFK, and this lad’s dad. By rights should be Joe III (all have Patrick for a middle name)
Joe Kennedy III—this newcomer.
Joe II was married to Sheila Rauch but later tried for an annullment, thus the comment about “trying to get him declared illegitimate”. Joe III’s twin brother’s middle name is Rauch
(Matthew Rauch Kennedy)
About the annullment attempt, via the entry for J. Kennedy III on Wikipedia:
>>Two years later, Kennedy asked the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston for an annulment of the marriage on the grounds of “lack of due discretion of judgment”, meaning that he was mentally incapable of entering into marriage at the time of his wedding. An annulment would give the marriage the status of never having existed, and allow Kennedy to marry Anne Elizabeth “Beth” Kelly—his former staff member—in a Roman Catholic ceremony, as well as allow him to participate in other sacraments of the church, such as Holy Communion, not available to a divorced person who remarries. Rauch refused to agree to the annulment,and Kennedy married Kelly in a non-Catholic civil ceremony on October 23, 1993.
>>The Boston Archdiocese initially granted Kennedy the annulment, which was only discovered by Rauch after the decision in 1996. Rauch, who is an Episcopalian, wrote a book Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage explaining that she was opposed to the concept of annulment, because it meant in Roman Catholic theology that the marriage had never actually existed, and claiming that the Kennedy family influence made it possible to unilaterally “cancel” a twelve-year marriage. A tribunal decision in favour of annulment is automatically appealed, and the decision is not effective until a second, conforming, sentence is granted. Instead of allowing the appeal to take place in the United States, Rauch appealed directly to the Holy See.
...The original decision was overturned by the highest appellate tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Rota, in 2005. Rauch was informed of the decision by the Boston Archdiocese in 2007.[53] As the first decision was never confirmed, there was no time at which the Church declared the marriage to be null or gave Kennedy permission to remarry. Because the Rota was sitting as a second-instance appellate court,[54] Kennedy could appeal the decision to another Rotal panel.