Jackie Kennedy’s husband Aristotle Onassis was a closeted, violent bisexual, new book claims

A new biography of Aristotle Onassis claims that the billionaire businessman was secretly bisexual and “savagely beat” young male sex workers.

Onassis was famously the second husband of Jacqueline “Jackie” Lee Kennedy Onassis, who was married to US president John F. Kennedy. Jackie married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, five years after JFK was assassinated.

The widowed former first lady was 39 when she announced her engagement to Onassis, who was 62. The Greek shipping magnate was one of the richest men in the world at the time, and her relationship with the famed womaniser scandalised the world. She even condemned by some as a “public sinner”.

Aristotle Onassis was born on January 15, 1906, in Smyrna, a town in present-day Turkey. He made his fortune in the 1920s, by starting his own brand of cigarettes aimed at the female market. 

Then, he turned his attention to the shipping trade, buying six ships for less than half of what they would normally cost, during the Great Depression.

As well as being a shrewd businessman, Aristotle Onassis was famed for being “highly sexual”, not to mention crude. His tastes were unusual to say the least.

He famously owned a set of barstools he’d had covered in whale scrotum. On the other hand, the bereaved Jackie Kennedy was seen as a sort of “people’s princess” of the time, elegant, tragic, vulnerable and dignified.

In the new book, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Daily Mail columnist Maureen Callahan, she explores the claims that Onassis was bisexual.

It’s rumoured that after his son Alexander died in a plane crash in 1973, Aristotle Onassis consoled himself by sleeping with young Italians, then “beating them up”.

Aristotle Onassis also spoke about a same-sex relationship he had when he was young with an older Turkish lieutenant that secured his father’s freedom, as well as some of “his family’s lost holdings in Smyrna”.

Interestingly, Jackie’s other husband, JFK, was also rumoured to be bisexual.

Despite his Catholic upbringing, Kennedy was inseparable from his friend Kirk LeMoyne ‘Lem’ Billings, after the pair first met in prep school. Though their relationship was considered platonic at the time author Jerry Oppenheimer claims the pair had “a friendship that included oral sex, with Jack always on the receiving end”.

The new book also explores claims that Aristotle Onassis treated Jackie like a “prostitute,” and that he would make her have sex with him in places that were at least partially public: on his plane behind a curtain, in a boat tethered to his yacht, and in his bedroom with the door open.

Aristotle Onassis died in 1975; Jackie inherited $25 million from his estate.

Following his death Jackie Onassis worked as a book editor. She passed away from cancer in her Manhattan apartment in 1994 aged 64, with her children by her side.