Early Life
Michael Skakel was one of seven children born to Rushton Walter Skakel (1923-2003) and Anne Reynolds (1932-1973). The family lived in the neighborhood of Belle Haven in Greenwich, Connecticut. After his mother's death from brain cancer in 1973, Skakel began abusing alcohol and had difficulties at school. His cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. later wrote that Skakel was a "small sensitive child — the runt of the litter with a harsh and occasionally violent alcoholic father who both ignored and abused him." He also struggled for years with dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until he was 26.
In 1978, Skakel was arrested for drunk driving in New York. To avoid criminal charges, Skakel's family sent him to the Elan School in Poland Spring, Maine, where he received treatment for alcoholism. He left the school after two years and spent much of the 1980s competing on the national speed skiing circuit. In 1993, he graduated from Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, and worked as a driver for Ted Kennedy's 1994 reelection campaign. Later that year he took a job working for his cousin Michael Kennedy at the Citizens Energy Corporation as director of international programs.
Read more about this topic: Martha Moxley
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The worldling’s eyes shall gather dew,
Dreaming in throngful city ways
Of winter joys his boyhood knew;
And dear and early friends—the few”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)