A major rift became apparent on Friday between the the blood relatives of suicide victim Mary Kennedy and the famous family that she married into.
Each side is planning its own memorial service for Mary, 52, the estranged wife of Robert Kennedy Jr., who hanged herself in an outbuilding at her upstate New York home on Wednesday.
And her brother, Thomas Richardson filed a motion in court in White Plains, N.Y., naming RFK Jr. as the defendant, the New York Post reported. The contents of the motion were not made public and were immediately sealed along with other documents related to the case.
The court ordered the Westchester County Medical Examiner's office to release her body to Robert Kennedy on Friday just hours before a wake was scheduled to start at the $4 million home where Mary lived alone.
Mary and Robert Kennedy were going through a lengthy, contested divorce, when she committed suicide on Wednesday. Friends and family say she struggled for years with depression, which had gotten worse after Robert won custody of the couple's four children in February. She also had a history of alcohol and prescription pill abuse.
The Kennedy family was behind Friday night's wake and planned a funeral in St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Mount Kisco on Saturday with burial at the family compound in Hyannis, Mass.
Meanwhile, Mary Kennedy's siblings announced through their lawyer, Kerry Lawrence, that they were planning a memorial service in Manhattan, though they didn't say when.
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