Exclusive: Blondie’s Chris Stein says Robert Kennedy Jr. hit on his wife at charity event

In 2009, Robert Kennedy Jr. was still involved with the Riverkeeper Foundation. He was then married to his second wife, Mary Richardson, and had four children.

Chris Stein, who co-founded the legendary new wave group Blondie with Debbie Harry, remembers Kennedy well. He and Blondie entertained a crowd of wealthy guests at a Riverkeeper event in 2009 with hits like “Heart of Glass” and “One Way or Another.”

Stein tells me that Kennedy hit on his wife on that occasion.

“She stood in line to meet him,” Stein says of his wife, Barbara Sicuranza. (They have now been married for 25 years.) “When she came, she said, ‘He shook my hand too long. It was creepy.'” That wasn’t all. Barbara realized what was going on. “She said, ‘He tickled the inside of my palm with his middle finger.’ She was really horrified.”

I had asked Stein, a rock’n’roll hero, about a tweet he posted on June 17. He had written: “This motherfucker hit on my wife at a River Keeper event in NYC. True story.”

The Steins were not bothered by the passport, they accepted it calmly and carried on. Kennedy and Richardson separated in 2010. In 2012, she committed suicide by hanging herself in her barn.

The New York Post subsequently published Kennedy’s sex diary, which listed all of his affairs during the marriage.

And Stein has just published his beautifully crafted memoir called “Under a Rock.” Stein wrote it himself, and I would say it ranks alongside literary rock memoirs like Sting’s “Broken Music” and Patti Smith’s “Just Kids.”

Stein writes about his childhood in Brooklyn, his beginnings in rock from 1965 to 1971 and how everything changed when classic rock became boring in the mid-70s. He was there at the birth of punk. Stein’s stories about the Ramones, Talking Heads, Johnny Thunders and his son are so detailed and personal that it’s hard to put the book down!

I also think it’s great that as a young gangster he met actor Tony Sirico, aka Paulie Walnuts from “The Sopranos”.

PS: The story about Kennedy is not in the book. It is only here in this column.