With episode five, “Battery Park,” Love Story finally reached the fight story.
The latest installment of the FX series—which aired just a day after the 30th anniversary of the incident—recreated the infamous confrontation between John F. Kennedy Jr. and his then-girlfriend Carolyn Bessette (as played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon). Taking place on February 25, 1996, in New York City’s Battery Park—not Washington Square Park, as is often incorrectly reported—the argument made headlines thanks to the presence of paparazzo Angie Coqueran, whose photographs were soon splashed all over the National Enquirer and New York Daily News.
“Unfortunately, they had a very private situation happen very publicly,” Kelly recently told GQ. “But there’s video evidence of this, and that’s one thing that we were able to really review pretty often and choreograph, so we would kind of be as close to the real thing as we could get it, without it being tacky.”
In Love Story, the public clash comes amidst friction between the duo after Bessette declines Kennedy’s recent marriage proposal. When the media gets wind of her reluctance, Kennedy—hoping to steer the conversation back to the impending launch of his magazine, George—makes a public statement denying that the proposal ever happened. As they walk their dog Friday in Battery Park, Kennedy is bragging about the reception to George, but Bessette is clearly unhappy. After she speeds ahead of him, he catches up to her and grabs her arm, causing her to pull away.
“I just need space,” she insists. “I think you can’t handle a partner who is emotionally mature enough to talk to you, because what you really need is an excuse to escape," he retorts. "You need control. You need to be the one who abandons. It’s obvious, and, quite frankly, lame.”
She accuses him of breaking his promise to keep their private life private and suggests that she can’t trust him. This is when they get face-to-face, and he begins yelling at her, contending that none of this would have happened if she’d accepted his proposal “like a normal fucking person.” A shouting match ensues. Bessette has been wearing a ring that belonged to Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline; when Kennedy grabs her hand to take it back, she resists, telling him to stop and indicating that he’s hurting her. When he retrieves the ring and walks away, she runs after him and jumps on his back, leading him to push her off. He’s trying to leave, but she keeps getting in his way and pushing him. “Talk to me, fucking pussy,” she declares.
The explosive action soon cuts to the couple sitting on a bench and talking more rationally. “What happens if I don’t fit into your life?” she asks. “It will be a disaster for you, and everyone will blame me.” They are then talking on the street, with him sitting on the ground, as she stands over him. She requests to have the ring back. He’s crying, and she bends down to console him. She then contends that they should leave because “people are looking.” He doesn’t care, even snapping at her when she tries to take the dog. Their big display wraps up with them smoking and him promising that he has no desire to one day be president. “I don’t wanna be a great man,” he says. “I just wanna be a good man. A good partner to you.” She finally agrees to marry him.
As staged by the episode’s director, Crystle Roberson Dorsey, the filming of the fight seemed so real that it garnered some concerning attention. “On the Citizen app, somebody made a domestic dispute report on it,” Kelly told GQ. “I guess you’re doing your job when the public is like, ‘Oh, shit’s going down.’”
But how accurate was Love Story’s recreation? The widely-circulated photos and videos from the day match up pretty well, from the clothing to the movements and positioning of the argument. In a recent interview with the Daily Mail, Coqueran recalled witnessing the event. “Carolyn was trying to grab the dog leash, and he physically pushed her back over and over again,” she said. “It looked like he was going to smack her in the face.” In the videos, you can see much of what is depicted in the episode, including Bessette jumping on Kennedy’s back, repeatedly refusing to get out of his way, them sitting in silence on a bench, and Kennedy pulling the ring away from her. Although, unlike in the series, Coqueran believes that the ring fell on the ground, appearing to break in two. When Coqueran then went to sell the photos, she said that Kennedy’s representatives were contacted for comment, and they initially denied the fight ever took place, not realizing that pictures existed.
Where Love Story and reality most differ is the cause of the fight. The show posits that it happened when the tension related to the proposal non-answer boiled over, and that Bessette was angry at Kennedy’s decision to publicly comment on the speculation. But Kennedy reportedly proposed over the July 4th weekend of 1995, and Bessette accepted a few weeks later—not after the Feb. 1996 argument. And Love Story’s timeline has Kennedy celebrating the coverage of George’s launch, which actually took place months earlier, in September.
There’s been much speculation about the true reason things blew up that day. Coqueran said that she followed them that morning because she knew that Kennedy would likely be on edge due to the New York Times running an auction listing for his late mother’s possessions. Kennedy’s friend Steven M. Gillon wrote in the 2019 biography, America's Reluctant Prince, that the fight—and many others—“stemmed from Carolyn’s ongoing complaint that John let people walk all over him.”
Meanwhile, some conspiracy theorists posit that the public showdown was staged to suggest that they were on the brink of splitting up, hoping that this would put an end to the fascination with every detail of their impending nuptials. That fascination, of course, persists—and in next week’s episode, “The Wedding,” audiences can expect to see every detail of the big day recreated in glamorous and painstaking detail.