Dunne ‘persecuted’ Skakel for own aggrandizement

August 27th, 2009 - 6:54 pm ICT by IBNS  

By Samrat Banerjee

don2 Aug 27 (IBNS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Skakel’s cousin, told New York magazine in 1993 that author and journalist Dominick Dunne was a “pathetic creature” and had persecuted Skakel for his own aggrandizement.

Dunne is at peace after fighting a lost battle with bladder cancer. His suffering is over. He was 83. He passed away Wednesday in Manhattan, according to his son, actor-producer Griffin Dunne. Dunne was a novelist, a film producer, a TV executive and amateur prosecutor.

For his part, Dunne’s motivation in pursuing the Moxley murder stemmed in part from the fact that Martha Moxley was killed October 30 - seven years to the date before his own daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, would be killed by an ex-boyfriend on her porch in West Hollywood.

Dunne’s account of the trial of the man accused of Dominique’s murder was his first article for Vanity Fair, which he joined in 1984 as a contributing editor and where he was named special correspondent in 1993. His coverage of the trials of O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Skakel, Kennedy Smith, and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, were unorthodox and decidedly unobjective.

He is survived by two sons, Griffin and Alexander. Their mother, Ellen, who was divorced from Dunne, died in 1997.

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