Shawn Hubler’s story about internet darling Cory Kennedy in last Sunday’s LA Times has been getting some buzz all its own, but one detail that I haven’t seen addressed much is the age difference between her and her once boyfriend Mark “The Cobra Snake” Hunter, a relationship her mother, Jinx Kennedy, condoned.
“We were just glad that she was happy,” Jinx says. And when it became apparent that the almost-21-year-old photographer was dating her not-quite-16-year-old daughter, she says, she insisted that the couple spend their time together at the Kennedy-Levin home, where she could watch them.
“I said, ‘Mark, I love you dearly and I’d hate to put you in jail, but I’d do it in a New York minute,'” she remembers. In truth, though, she and her husband felt that Hunter was good for their daughter: “I thought she would be protected because Mark is a great guy.”
(Noted: Kevin Roderick commented that the Santa Monica teen and her mom “come across as less than stable” in the piece.”)
Um, who gives a shit? Besides the general Hollywood trash socialites, I mean.
But if it weren’t for blogging.la, where would we get our Cobra Snake updates?
moot…
Obviously, you don’t, and that’s fine. So there’s your answer.
Re – the story:
Yes… I found it a bit disturbing as well. Nothing wrong with a young girl getting noticed, and getting into a “scene”… but I think her mother is totally fortunate that she was able to get Cory into a program at all. At 15, 16 years old – dating a young man 5 years older isn’t necessarily uncommon (it happens a lot), and the story pointedly stayed away from getting into anything like a discussion about sexual contact – which is like saying “don’t pay attention to that pink elephant” – and the getting into the adult parties is a series of possibly huge problems… but for me the real ugly thing that comes out of this is the absolute commodification of our kids. Yeah, I said kids. JonBenet Ramsey is only the most notorious of these examples. What’s next? Sexually oriented advertisements featuring 10 year olds? It is a slippery slope, it is real predatory, and it is ugly.
That said, it doesn’t seem like Cory was anyone’s victim – and that says a lot about her particular composition. I get the feeling she’s going to be something big in a few years. Go girl!