While appearing on the Season 16 premiere of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” Martha Stewart revealed a shocking moment from her past that she revisits to this day.
The Bravo series retooled its cast after concluding its Season 15 reunion in February 2025. Returning members Sai De Silva, Erin Lichy and Jessel Taank are back and joined by “RHONY” veteran Carole Radziwill (Seasons 5 through 10) as well as new additions Hailey Glassman, Erika Hammond and Daisy Toye for Season 16 (Tuesdays, 8 p.m. ET/PT and Wednesdays on Peacock).
Toye is a celebrity makeup artist, and one of her clients is Stewart. While in Toye’s glam chair during the Sept. 8 premiere, Stewart said that she’d been watching “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,”
which was launched by FX on Feb. 12.
Stewart, 85, then revealed she saw Kennedy the week of his fatal plane crash in 1999.
“I was with John-John, this is JFK Jr., I was with him the Monday before the Friday when they died,” Stewart told Toye. “He called me. I was running Martha Stewart Living magazine, and he called me and he said he’s in trouble and could he please talk to me about what to do with George, the magazine that he had started. And I said, ‘Of course. Anything you want.’
“We had a very nice dinner,” Stewart continued. “And then at the end of the dinner, I said to him, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we’re going to a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard. And I’m taking my wife and her sister.’ And I said, ‘Well, who’s flying?’ He said, ‘I’m flying.’ I said, ‘You have a co-pilot, right?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t need a co-pilot.’”
“I’ve thought about that so many times that I told him to get a co-pilot,” Stewart added. “I feel sorry.”
On July 16, 1999, Kennedy sat in the pilot’s seat of his single-engine plane that took off from Essex County Airport in Fairfield, New Jersey. He and Bessette intended to drop off her sister, Lauren Bessette, in Martha's Vineyard before continuing to Hyannis Port with his wife, for cousin Rory Kennedy's wedding. It’s believed Kennedy experienced spatial disorientation before his plane collided with the Atlantic Ocean, killing all three onboard.
According to a report from the National Transportation Safety Board that investigated the crash, an unnamed certified flight instructor "talked to the pilot on the day of the accident and offered to fly with him on the accident flight." The instructor said Kennedy "replied that 'he wanted to do it alone.'" The instructor also revealed "he would not have felt comfortable with [Kennedy] conducting night flight operations on a route similar to the one flown on, and in weather conditions similar to those that existed on the night of the accident."
Radziwill was married to Kennedy’s maternal cousin, Anthony Radziwill, from 1994 until his death following a long cancer battle the month after the plane crash.
Carole Radziwill recently told USA TODAY that, though she didn’t watch “Love Story,” it resurfaced her emotions while filming "RHONY."
“It’s a little grief that I felt, almost the whole time I was filming,” she said. “You'll see the arc of that story throughout, I think, the whole season. Certainly in the beginning, and then it comes up really big at the end...”
Carole Radziwill, 63, described the scripted series starring Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon as “a body slam,” which she “couldn't get away from”.
“The other women on the cast watched it and were curious about this and that. It was very hard,” Radziwill said. “I hadn't planned on talking about it. I wrote about it. I think people sometimes conflate talking and writing. What I had to say about that time in my life, I wrote in a book [‘What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love’].”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Martha Stewart reveals the warning she gave JFK Jr. days before he died
