The fifty-nine-year-old senator orders his usual double Chivas Regal on the rocks, while Patrick chats with twenty-seven-year-old Michele Cassone, and Willie meets a twenty-nine-year-old single mother named Patricia Bowman. Willie tells her he’s about to become a doctor, and Bowman tells him about her two-year-old daughter’s health problems.
“I really felt like I could trust him. He seemed to be an intelligent man, a likable man,” Bowman says of Willie. “During our dancing he’d never laid one hand on me. He had never done anything suggestive at all.”
The Kennedys join Bowman’s friend Anne Mercer and Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, at their table. The conversation is barely audible above the pulsing music, but at some point, Mercer starts arguing politics with the senator. Ted decides to leave with Patrick, who invites Michele Cassone back to the Kennedy mansion for a drink and a million-dollar view of the Atlantic. She accepts, following Patrick and his father’s white convertible in her own car.
The Kennedy mansion at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard is a Mediterranean-style home designed by architect Addison Mizner in 1923, and has been in the Kennedy family since 1933, when Joe Sr. bought it during the Depression for a steal at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. JFK wrote Profiles in Courage while vacationing there, as well as his inaugural address. The mansion is known as “La Guerida” but has been nicknamed the “Kennedy Winter White House” ever since Jack began using it as a presidential retreat. Despite the home’s fashionable pedigree, however, most first-time visitors in the 1990s are surprised at its shabby-chic décor. “It was dark, dingy, and smelly,” recalls Michele Cassone, cracking, “If it was my house, I’d have it exterminated.”
Ted, Patrick, and Cassone chat in the living room, where Cassone switches from flutes of nightclub bubbly to glasses of white wine. Everyone else in the house is apparently asleep.
“Ted was very drunk, and Patrick and I had a nice buzz on,” she recalls.
The senator disappears from the room. Patrick and Cassone head into a bedroom the cousins are sharing for the weekend and start making out.
Then Ted comes into his son’s room to say good night. But he’s not wearing any pants, only underwear and his long-tailed shirt.
“I got totally weirded out,” Cassone recalls. “I said, ‘I’m outta here.’”
Patrick escorts Michele Cassone to her car and politely says good night.
Farther down the beach, things are unfolding differently.
Left without a ride when his uncle and cousin took off earlier, Willie asks Patricia Bowman for a lift home when Au Bar closes at 3:00 a.m. She’s happy to oblige, and when they arrive, the two of them go for a walk on the sand, despite a brisk breeze.
According to Bowman’s version of what happens next, Willie then asks her if she’d like to go skinny dipping. She declines. But he goes ahead, stripping off his clothes and wading into the cold surf.
Bowman turns to go up to the house and to her car. “I’ve had a nice night with a nice guy,” she later recalls thinking as she left. “It would be nice if he called again, but hey, let’s be realistic, he’s a Kennedy.”
But as she reaches the concrete steps, she claims, she feels a hand grab her bare ankle from behind. She trips and falls. It’s Willie, who she says has suddenly undergone a “surreal” aggressive transformation. She breaks free and starts “running, to get away,” but Willie, who is six-two and around two hundred pounds, tackles her on the lawn by the pool.
“I tried to arch my back to get him off me,” five-six, 130-pound Bowman will later testify, “and he slammed me back into the ground. I was yelling, ‘No!’ and then ‘Stop!’”
But Willie won’t stop. “I was struggling, and he told me to ‘Stop it, Bitch,’” she alleges. “Then he pushed my dress up and he raped me. I thought he was going to kill me.”
Per her police report, Bowman “remembers hearing herself screaming and wondering why no one in the house would come out and help her, especially since she knew that Senator Kennedy was in the house.”
Yet Ted and Patrick will swear in court they never heard any screams—nor did the other dozen or so people staying in the house. Willie’s mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, was sleeping at the Palm Beach estate that night, but says she didn’t hear anyone crying for help, or any other noises. Other houseguests, including William Barry (the former FBI agent who wrested the gun from Sirhan Sirhan after he shot Bobby Kennedy) and two prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office (friends of John Kennedy Jr.’s) also assert it was a peaceful night.
Nevertheless, Patricia Bowman says she finally manages to escape from Willie and runs into the house, where she hides in the kitchen. When she spots a phone on the counter, she uses it to call her friend Anne Mercer.
“I wanted somebody to come and help me feel safe. And I didn’t know that the police would care or would come,” Bowman says, explaining why she calls Mercer instead of 911. “I had just been raped by a Kennedy. And I didn’t know what power they held,” she says. “These are political people and…maybe they owned the police.”
As soon as she hangs up, Bowman says, she hears Willie calling for her. He finds her hiding in the kitchen and pulls her into another room. But this time Bowman confronts him.
“I told him that he raped me, and he looked at me, the calmest, smuggest, most arrogant man, and he said, ‘No one will believe you.’”
Chapter 44
Anne Mercer and her boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, arrive at the Kennedy estate about fifteen minutes after getting the call from Patricia Bowman. “She was literally shaking and she looked messed up, her hair and makeup was running,” Mercer recalls. Willie, on the other hand, looks “disheveled” but calm.
Mercer and Desiderio take Bowman back to Mercer’s house, but before leaving the house on North Ocean Boulevard, they swipe a few small items—a framed photo, a notepad, a decorative urn—as proof they have indeed all been there.
Mercer gives Bowman a change of clothes.
Nine hours later, Patricia Bowman is at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office to file a report of rape—and to name her attacker. The Kennedy name drops with a thud.
Later that afternoon, Bowman is at Humana Hospital, where she undergoes forensic tests and is treated for minor back injuries. “I felt all this fear and this dirtiness,” she says. “I was just so afraid and confused by everything that had happened to me. I was a mess.”
The attending physician, Dr. Rebecca Prostko, is convinced “there was a traumatic event of some sort.” She later testifies, “Regressive behavior is a little hard to fake.”
While Bowman is being examined at the hospital that Saturday afternoon, Ted hosts a luncheon at the mansion. At the quiet gathering, there is no mention of the previous night’s “incident,” though there is talk between the cousins. As per the police investigation, Patrick recalls Willie telling him Bowman was “really whacked out,” and that they’d had sex without protection, later adding, “This is really a setup, isn’t it?” Another witness statement notes an overheard conversation at Chuck & Harold’s, a Palm Beach celebrity hangout, where a nearby patron hears the senator say to Willie, “And she will say it is rape.”