In many ways, the American media told Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s story. Beyond her time as First Lady, and after she masterfully orchestrated John F. Kennedy’s funeral, in 1963, and then established Camelot as his legacy, she kept her thoughts largely to herself. A public figure, she very much believed she deserved an existence as a private person—even if others frequently trespassed upon that privacy.
But in 1972, in a lawsuit against the overzealous celebrity photographer Ron Galella, Onassis used her voice, and she used it forcefully. She argued for her right to move unencumbered in public spaces without threat or fear from the sustained harassment she and her children had experienced at the hands of Galella for years. Finding that voice in the historical record was a real gift to me when I was researching my book Our Jackie, and it connected her life more directly to the lives of women navigating public spaces—in 1972 and in the present day.
In her testimony, Onassis used language that included “terrified,” “frightened,” “stunned,” “startled,” “afraid,” “anguished,” and “humiliated.” Even with the detailed extremes of Galella’s behavior, which ranged from grunting to thrusting, bumping, touching, and lunging (all language submitted for the court record), the photographer and his attorney Alfred S. Julien dismissed the idea that Galella presented a real threat or generated actual fear or anxiety by his efforts.
During the trial, Julien made a point of holding up pictures his client had taken of Onassis as she navigated city streets, seemingly unperturbed, sometimes smiling, and asking if she had been afraid at the moment the image was captured. His claim was that she “grossly exaggerated” her sense of fear when pursued by Galella.
The inability or unwillingness of Galella and his counsel to imagine the fear and anxiety he generated in Onassis and her children, and the onus put upon Onassis to sufficiently present her fear, reflects a historic propensity to doubt women, to silence them, to make them feel that the public world is less theirs than it is that of the men with whom they must share that space.
Onassis and her children shared a particular history. More than once, their lives had been upended by a stranger committing a violent act on a loved one. They possessed, surely, a particular understanding of potential threats to them and their family from persons beyond their control.
About her physical response to Galella, Onassis shared the following while on the stand: “I always try to keep smiling when Galella is there. I know he wants to catch me looking terrified.... When Mr. Galella is photographing me I tried to keep a smile, keep my head up, act as normal as possible because I believe he wants to provoke an unusual response or gesture, a frightened look or shielding one’s face or something, so I try to keep my head up and keep smiling.”
While an average woman might not share the experience of being tracked by an aggressive photographer, one can imagine other women employing such a strategy when catcalled or approached by a strange man in a public space. Onassis’s visage was not about an absence of fear but a mechanism for masking it.
Judge Irving Ben Cooper stopped short of acknowledging Onassis’s right to privacy as she imagined or desired it, although he did put limits on Galella’s access to her, requiring the photographer to keep a distance from Onassis and her children.
In his decision, Judge Cooper noted that Onassis on the stand was “candid and careful, frequently searching for the proper word in order to be precise; she was not given to exaggeration.” Galella and his counsel were the opposite, respectful of neither the law nor the truth.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis understood the importance of precision and moderation and self-presentation. As I read about this case, and read her words and the description of her performance, I thought so much of so many women who—without Onassis’s access to name and reputation and funds—likewise carry the burden of good behavior, of delineating their boundaries, and of setting limits on men’s perceived access to them in a public world that belongs not only to men but to all of us.
Karen M. Dunak is a history professor at Muskingum University, in Ohio
