After maintaining silence for almost six decades, an 83-year-old woman claiming to have been a former lover of 35th American president John F Kennedy, has opened up about the alleged affair in an essay published for a digital weekly magazine.

       Diana de Vegh, 20 years old at the time, said she first met Kennedy in 1958 at a ballroom in Boston, when he was on a re-election tour for senator.

       “The senator was standing directly across the table. And he was looking … at me. Oh, God, don’t let me blush, I prayed. Useless, of course,” she wrote for Air Mail magazine on Saturday.

       It was at this table they were first introduced, after which he asked Ms De Vegh’s date to give up his seat. “Give me your seat, so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl,” she recalled him saying.

       He would often tell her she was “special” and had a “spark”, wrote Ms De Vegh, who was then a student at the Radcliffe College.

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       “‘I’m expecting great things from you, ya know.’ Always laughing, always looking at me in what I hoped was a special way,” she wrote. “I didn’t realise then that I’d simply been netted, separated from the other students, who might have offered some emotional ballast in this situation.”

       The affair reportedly continued for about four years. But this “is not a romantic story” she admitted in the essay, adding it took “years to recover” from it and “almost as many years to finally write this.”

       A driver named Dave would pick Ms De Vegh up from her off-campus residence and chaperon her to wherever Kennedy was campaigning, according to her.

       “Then one evening when he [Kennedy] got in the car, he said, ‘I’m hungry. Let’s go to the apartment. We’ll find something to eat’,” she said referring to his apartment in Boston.

       She added it was easy for her not to “consider the facts” including that of his marital status because “he never mentioned it, so … I decided not to think about it. I stayed in my bubble.”

       The alleged relationship took a downturn after she began feeling Kennedy did not “care” for her and their meetings reduced, despite her moving to Washington after his presidential win in 1960.

       “He had brought me into his world: he had chosen me. But to be chosen means that one could be unchosen,” she wrote.

       Ms De Vegh said she managed her feelings “by clutching my substantive job ever more closely as a marker of identity,” referring to her work as a research assistant at the National Security Council.

       Then in 1962, Kennedy discovered that her father was Hungarian economist Imrie de Vegh, someone he had been consulting with over political affairs.

       “He had nothing against me, but he realised it could really be a problem, because a lot of people knew my dad, but he couldn’t just drop me, so we had to kind of dwindle,” she explained, in an interview to the New York Post. “I didn’t realise quite what was going on, but then things shifted radically.”

       The relationship ultimately ended after Ms De Vegh resigned from her position as research assistant and moved to Paris. It was there that she learned of his assassination.

       “I just went completely numb,” she told the New York Post. “I was having dinner in a bistro in my neighbourhood and it came on the news and I thought, this can’t be true. I went home and went to bed and the next day I got every copy of every newspaper.”

       Thinking back about the “loaded words” of “consent, choice, abuse” in her relationship with Kennedy, Ms De Vegh, now a private psychotherapist, said though she “was past the age of consent”, she wonders if Kennedy should have thought about the “power differential.”

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       “Could it, should it, have occurred to him that at twice my age there might be a power differential? That at least chronologically he was a functioning adult and presumably capable of making a more thoughtful choice?”

       Ms De Vegh, who is also legally blind, said the #MeToo movement “has provided a specific context for needed re-evaluation,” as she reflected on the “inequality and idealisation” while in a relationship with a celebrity.