On the final afternoon of 1997, a group of Kennedys was playing a family game of football on skis near the base of Aspen Mountain. The ball was a plastic water bottle stuffed with snow. It was a rough, fast, competitive tradition they had brought from Cape Cod to the Colorado slopes. Late in the afternoon, Michael Kennedy, the sixth child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, skied out to receive a pass.
As he caught it, he skied straight into a tree. He was dead before six o’clock that evening. In the hallway of Aspen Valley Hospital, gathered with the rest of the family, stood the daughter of one of the most famous voices in American sports. She was crying.
Almost a month earlier, a judge had approved her divorce from the man who had just died. And yet Victoria Gifford Kennedy was there. Victoria was the daughter of Frank Gifford, the football star who later became the calm, trusted voice of Monday Night Football. For sixteen years, she had been married to a Kennedy, a family photographed more than almost any other in America.
Her own family had been famous for most of her life as well. So it makes sense that her story keeps returning to a photograph. The photograph was taken on March 14, 1981, in New York City. It shows Frank Gifford standing beside his daughter on her wedding day.
She looks young and radiant. He is clearly the proudest man in the frame. For a time, that image looked like the first page of a fairy tale. The title of the story says the marriage destroyed her career.
But the word career meant something different for a woman in Victoria’s position. Three questions lie beneath everything that followed. Why did the daughter of America’s favorite football broadcaster marry the country’s most famous political family? Why was she in Aspen that night beside the husband she was in the middle of divorcing?
And what did that marriage really cost her? Victoria Denise Gifford was born on February 20, 1957. Her father was already famous, though in a different way than he would later become. Frank Gifford was a handsome offensive halfback for the New York Giants, a USC graduate.
Her mother, Maxine, had been a USC homecoming queen. They married in January 1952 and had three children: Jeff, Kyle, and Victoria. Frank grew up poor in California during the Depression, moving from oil town to oil town. Football was his way out.
The Giants drafted him in 1952. In 1956 he was named the league’s Most Valuable Player, and the Giants won the championship that same year. In November 1960, Philadelphia’s Chuck Bednarik hit him so hard that the collision became one of the most famous in football history. Frank left the field with a severe concussion and missed the entire next season.
In 1962 he returned, played three more seasons, and retired after 1964. Then he moved to the broadcast booth, which made him far more famous than football ever had. In 1971, ABC placed him in the Monday Night Football booth. For the rest of Victoria’s childhood, her father’s voice reached tens of millions of American living rooms every autumn Sunday.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977. Victoria grew up watching what that kind of fame did to a family. Strangers acted as if they owned a part of her father. Photographers chased him everywhere.
Her parents eventually divorced. In 1978 Frank married a fitness instructor named Astrid Lindley. That marriage ended in 1986, and in the same year he married a young television hostess named Kathie Lee Johnson, who would become one of the most famous women in daytime television as Kathie Lee Gifford. Victoria had a front-row seat to how a famous man’s private life could separate from his public one.
Michael Kennedy grew up on the other side of American fame. He was born in Washington on February 27, 1958, the sixth of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s eleven children. He was five years old when his uncle the president was shot in Dallas. He was ten when his father was shot in Los Angeles in June 1968.
By age ten, he had watched the two most important men in his family killed in public before he understood why. His mother was left with ten children and another on the way. His younger sister Rory was born the following December. The house Michael grew up in was famous, enormous, and steeped in grief.
Friends and writers described Ethel’s homes as loud, crowded, and chaotic, full of children, dogs, and games out of control. By the late 1970s, the Kennedy generation had given the papers plenty to write about. The family needed good news, and Michael seemed to be it. He was friendly, athletic, unafraid of physical risk, and did well at Harvard.
By the family’s own estimate, he was one of their most balanced members. In September 1980, the engagement was announced. Frank Gifford’s daughter would marry Robert Kennedy’s son. On the surface, it looked perfect.
Two of the most famous names in America, one from sports and one from politics, joined in a single image. What each family was truly getting from the marriage, or what it would cost the person standing in the middle of it, no one could yet see. On March 14, 1981, Victoria Gifford married Michael Kennedy in New York City. She was twenty-four; he had just turned twenty-three.
The wedding was a social event, the kind the press had covered for the Kennedys for decades. Andy Warhol was among the guests and later wrote in his diary that she was the most beautiful bride he had ever seen. The children came quickly: Michael Jr. in 1983, Kyle in 1984, and Rory in 1987.
In 1986 Michael became president of Citizens Energy, a nonprofit founded by his older brother Joe that bought oil and sold discounted heating fuel to poor families and the elderly in Massachusetts. Michael was good at his job. He was even better at politics, and insiders across the state began talking about him as the Kennedy who might run next. But the marriage was falling apart.
The family had a babysitter, the teenage daughter of close friends and neighbors in Cohasset. She had cared for Michael and Victoria’s three children for years, since she herself was a little girl. In early 1995, Victoria discovered that Michael was involved in a relationship with that teenage girl. Michael blamed alcohol and entered treatment.
Victoria stayed. On April 25, 1997, the Boston Globe put the story on its front page. The paper reported that Michael Kennedy had had an affair with the family’s former babysitter and that, according to its sources, the relationship began when she was in her early teens. In Massachusetts the age of consent was sixteen.
If the relationship began before that, it could be a serious crime. Within days, the Norfolk County district attorney, Jeffrey Locke, opened an investigation. Almost at the same moment, Michael and Victoria announced their separation. Then, in May 1997, a tabloid published photos of Frank Gifford in a New York hotel room with a woman who was not his wife.
It was a sting. The tabloid had paid the woman to lure him there and hidden cameras in the room. Kathie Lee Gifford publicly forgave her husband, and they remained married for the rest of his life. In early June 1997, Victoria met with investigators.
Afterward she released a brief statement expressing hope that everyone involved could soon move on with their lives. In July 1997, the district attorney closed the investigation without charges. He said the young woman, now a college student, had refused to participate. Without her, there was no conclusive independent evidence that the relationship had crossed the legal line before she turned sixteen.
Michael issued a public apology, saying he had made serious mistakes. The political damage was already done. A Boston Herald poll that summer found that about seventeen percent of voters were less likely to support Joe Kennedy for governor because of his brother Michael’s scandal alone. In August 1997, Joe abandoned his plans to run for governor.
In that same autumn, the divorce went before a Massachusetts judge. About a month before New Year’s Eve, the judge approved it. But in Massachusetts, a divorce does not take effect immediately. It is first issued as a suspended judgment and becomes final only after a ninety-day waiting period, a pause written into law to give couples one last chance at reconciliation.
Victoria’s divorce would not become final until late February 1998. At the end of December, the family went to Aspen as they often did in winter. Ethel was there, and so, despite everything, was Victoria. It was New Year’s Eve, 1997.
The slopes of Aspen Mountain were crowded with holiday skiers, and the light had begun to fade. A group of Kennedys gathered on an intermediate trail called Cooper Bowl to play the game they had played for years. Someone stuffed snow into a plastic water bottle, and that became the ball. Michael was thirty-nine and not wearing a helmet.
He skied out to catch a pass, caught it, and hit a tree. His youngest sister Rory, twenty-nine, had been on the slope. She knelt in the snow beside her brother and tried to breathe for him. The ski patrol reached him in about four minutes.
They put him on a sled, and an ambulance took him to Aspen Valley Hospital. His heart restarted for a time, but his injuries were too severe. About an hour and a half after the accident, before six o’clock that evening, Michael Kennedy was pronounced dead. In the hospital hallway, the family gathered.
Kathie Lee Gifford later wrote in a 2020 book that Ethel was literally paralyzed with grief. She stayed beside Ethel for over an hour at the body of her son, and wrote that Vicki, her stepdaughter, was there too, sobbing brokenheartedly. Victoria had spent nearly three years living with a secret she never asked to carry, and eight months watching it play out in the newspapers. She had signed the papers to leave.
Now she stood in a Colorado hospital corridor on the last night of the year, crying for the man she had been trying to leave. Part of the answer is simple. She was the mother of his three children, aged fourteen, thirteen, and ten, and their father had just died. Part of it is legal.
The divorce was not final, so on paper she was still his wife. In the days after his death, CNN and others reported that the couple had reconciled before he died. Other reports called her his estranged wife. She never said anything, and her silence cuts both ways.
It protects what remained between them, and it protects her children from a question no child should have to hear answered in public. Because the divorce never became final, his death ended the matter. In the eyes of the law, Victoria Gifford Kennedy never became his ex-wife. She became his widow.
Three days later, on January 3, 1998, nearly five hundred people filled the Church of Our Lady of Victory in Centerville on Cape Cod. When Ethel Kennedy entered the church to bury her son, Victoria was the one who walked beside her. Joe Kennedy delivered the eulogy. He said Michael was one man but was like a hundred points of light, and that the whole country knew his name, though few knew the best of what he did.
Then he spoke directly to Michael’s three children. He told young Michael, Kyle, and Rory that they could still talk to their father. Andy Williams sang, and fourteen-year-old Michael Jr. helped carry his father’s coffin.
Outside the church, cameras caught Victoria with her children, her father standing near her, as he had on her wedding day sixteen years earlier. Michael was buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, near his brother David and his grandparents. Then the story changed, as it always seems to with the Kennedys. The word scandal disappeared from the headlines.
The word curse took its place. Michael was no longer mentioned as a man under investigation but as another Kennedy lost young, another name on a list stretching back to Dallas and Los Angeles. Eighteen months later, the cousin who had called Michael an example of bad behavior, John F. Kennedy Jr.
, also died in a plane crash, and the word curse was printed again. Opinions about Victoria remain divided. Some are harsh. They say she knew for over two years and stayed, that she protected the Kennedy name and Kennedy money along with her marriage, that her silence helped a powerful man avoid a harsher reckoning.
Others see a woman treated terribly by her husband, left to absorb the damage to his entire clan while raising three children who watched everything she did. The record does not settle it. There is also a rumor that her silence was bought, but no public record supports it. What is on the record is that she hired lawyers, signed a property agreement, and put a stable plan in place for her children before most people even knew her marriage was in danger.
In the years that followed, almost everyone connected to those events spoke about her except Victoria. She never wrote a memoir. As far as public records show, she never sat for a revealing interview. She never sold her story.
She raised her three children and stayed out of the spotlight. She kept both names, still known as Victoria Gifford Kennedy, the daughter of the football hero and the widow of a Kennedy in a single name. The title speaks of her career. The honest answer is that Victoria never had a career.
She moved from being a famous man’s daughter to a famous family’s wife at twenty-four. Her public life was built for her by two families who each had a use for her. When it all collapsed in the spring of 1997, there was nothing beneath her that she had been allowed to build for herself. What the marriage took from her was the chance to be known for anything other than the men she was connected to.
That is a larger loss than any job title. But she controlled the one thing she could. She could not control what the Globe printed or what the district attorney decided or what her father did in a hotel room or what happened on a mountain in Colorado. She could control her own voice, and she chose to keep it for herself and her children.
Her children grew up under their father’s name without ever having to read their mother’s version of the worst year of their father’s life. Whatever she knew, whatever she felt, she never forced them to read it. A mother can give her children far worse things than silence. In a story like this, her silence should not be mistaken for having nothing to say.
Everyone else who told the story had something to gain from it, whether a book to sell, a reputation to repair, a brother to defend, or a Kennedy legend to protect. Victoria had more to say than any of them, and she said the least.