Imagine you are a young woman in an upturned car that has just plunged into a shallow body of water. It’s not sinking, but you can’t get out. You are in complete darkness, up to your head in water, desperately breathing the air remaining in a tiny pocket, hoping that someone will rescue you. Then the air eventually runs out, leaving you to a slow, panicked death by suffocation.

That’s what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne, a young Kennedy campaign worker in July of 1969. She had attended a party at Martha’s Vineyard along with other “boiler room girls” who had worked for Sen. Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign until the time of his assassination earlier that summer. The party consisted of six married men and six unmarried women, and one of the married men attending was the young Sen. Ted Kennedy, who offered to take Mary Jo back to her hotel in Edgartown.

Somewhere between 11:30 pm and 1:00 am Kennedy accidentally drove his car off the now-infamous Chappaquiddick bridge into a tidal channel and swam off, leaving Mary Jo in the car to die of suffocation.

Now Hollywood producer Mark Ciardi will be releasing a biopic about the Chappaquiddick incident, but the focus is not on the ill-fated Mary Jo and her agonizing demise. No, Ciardi wants the viewer to see what Ted Kennedy ‘had to go through.’

He said, “Everyone has an idea of what happened on Chappaquiddick and this strings together the events in a compelling and emotional way. You’ll see what he had to go through.”

When I read that my stomach churned.