And this time, the treatment the Kennedys face will be very different.
Chapter 45
The bombshell allegations of rape on the beach outside the Kennedy mansion are splashed across the world from Au Bar, which doubles as the reporters’ impromptu Palm Beach newsroom.
Reporter Steve Dunleavy gets a sit-down scoop with Anne Mercer, who is paid forty thousand dollars for two ill-advised interviews broadcast on the tabloid TV show A Current Affair. And despite knowing nothing about what happened between Willie and Patricia Bowman, Michele Cassone charges multiple TV talk shows a thousand dollars each for dishing on Ted’s pantsless antics on that night.
On May 11, 1991, Willie turns himself in to the Palm Beach police on a sexual battery charge, and immediately posts bail. He calls the charges against him “an outrageous lie” and says he’s looking forward to being vindicated at trial.
By the time Case No. 91-5482—The State of Florida v. William Kennedy Smith—comes to trial, Newsweek predicts it “will be the most-watched legal proceeding in American history.” The brand-new Courtroom Television Network secures live broadcast rights, agreeing to obscure Bowman’s identity. “This trial was perfect for TV of course,” Alan Dershowitz points out, “it had sex [and] the Kennedys.”
The trial is watched by millions on television, but the Palm Beach County courtroom itself is small and cramped, allowing only three seats apiece for Patricia Bowman’s family and Willie’s. The extended Kennedy family comes out to support Willie—most notably his mother, Jean, and his aunts Ethel, Eunice, and Patricia, who rotate their supportive presence under close watch of the cameras.
Though his aunt Jackie doesn’t appear, John F. Kennedy Jr. makes two celebrity cameos at his cousin’s trial, and the public vie for glimpses of the famous family members. The Sun-Sentinel prints a “Spectators’ Guide” to “Smith and his entourage,” while local businesses cash in on the hundreds of reporters in need of photocopies, A/V hookups, and parking—not to mention entrepreneurs selling novelty Ted Kennedy-in-his-underwear T-shirts, or Sprinkles, the scoop shop with “trial flavors” like “Willi Vanilli,” “Teddy’s Best” (a boozy option), or “Lupo Lemon” (a reference to the judge’s sourpuss expression). As one TV reporter notes of the media coverage, “It looks more like a football game than a news event.”
* * *
The trial begins on December 2, 1991. William Kennedy Smith’s attorney is Roy Black, a celebrity Miami criminal defense trial lawyer known as “The Professor.” Unlike prosecutor Moira Lasch, who’s been given the nickname “The Ice Queen” and disdains the press, Black always seems to find time to give interviews.
Despite Lasch’s excellent reputation and conviction record, she fails to convince Judge Mary Lupo to allow testimony from three other women who all claim to have been similarly assaulted by Willie over the previous decade.
In 1983, “Lisa” was a nineteen-year-old law student dating Willie’s cousin Max (Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, the ninth of Bobby and Ethel’s children). She meets then-twenty-three-year-old Willie at a party in Manhattan, and finds him “quite charming.” Since he “in no way” seems to be coming on to her, she accepts Willie’s invitation to stay in a guest room at a nearby Kennedy home. Once there, however, Lisa says “he attacked me.” Then, when she managed to get free, “he tried to convince me that that wasn’t what had happened.”
Lisa tells her boyfriend, Max, of the disturbing encounter, which he downplays—although after his cousin’s arrest in Palm Beach, she states in court papers, Max apologizes for not taking her seriously back then, telling her, “Sounds like Willie has a really big problem. He needs some help.”
A second woman, “Lynn,” now a doctor, says that when she was a Georgetown student in the spring of 1988, Willie invited her to a family get-together. When Lynn arrives, Willie claims the others are all in the pool, although it’s clear there is no one else at the house. To Lynn’s dismay, Willie then “take[s] off his clothes” before diving nude into the water. Back inside, Lynn is even more surprised and frightened when Willie comes at her: “He threw me over the couch and I landed on my back, pinned to the floor by his wrist with him on top of me.” When he eventually lets her up, she quickly leaves.
The third woman is “Michele,” who states that when she was a grad student in 1988, she got drunk at a college picnic and Willie—“somebody that I knew…somebody that I trusted”—offers her a ride home. Instead, however, he takes her to his Georgetown carriage house, where he “started just getting more and more aggressive,” she recalls, “almost animal-like” and “ferocious.” He attempts to force her to give him oral sex, but “That’s when I kind of lost it, and I just passed out.” When she woke up the next morning, Michele says Willie was condescending and dismissive.
Judge Lupo rules the women’s depositions inadmissible.
In her opening statement, Moira Lasch portrays Patricia Bowman as a normal, hard-working single mother and Willie as a man who can’t accept rejection, while Roy Black says that following a “consensual act of sexual intercourse,” Bowman was the one who then felt slighted and resentful.
Lasch calls Anne Mercer as her first major witness. The night before the trial, the second of Mercer’s two paid interviews airs and during cross-examination, Black portrays Mercer as a liar and opportunist. He accuses her of changing her story to embarrass Senator Kennedy and of using the TV payout to finance a vacation in Mexico. Mercer is “a disastrous witness,” and Black later jokes, “I have to thank Steve Dunleavy for what he did,” regarding his interview with Mercer on A Current Affair.
Black is slowly managing to turn Willie into the victim.
Chapter 46
It’s the fourth day of the trial. Over the previous two days, Patricia Bowman has testified about her experiences in the early morning hours of March 30, 1991. While occasionally tearful, she’s direct and poised.
Roy Black, Willie’s defense attorney, highlights the gaps and contradictions in Bowman’s memory of events—discrepancies intensified by Judge Lupo’s exclusion of the prosecution’s expert on rape-trauma syndrome—but she’s resolute in her story. What Bowman says she struggles to understand, however, is “how this nice guy had turned into that one, the one who had raped me.”
Despite the allegations, a “nice guy” is how a number of people describe Willie, the second of Jean and Stephen Smith’s four children (his older brother by two years is Stephen Jr.; sisters Amanda and Kym are six and twelve years younger, respectively). A Georgetown friend calls Willie “a regular guy who happens to come from this amazing family,” while a supervisor notes Willie “doesn’t have any violence in him.” An ex-girlfriend says the rape allegations are “inconceivable,” stating that Willie is “a gentle person.” According to an article in the Washington Post, Willie has dated a “harem of women,” including Meg Ryan when they were both in their late twenties and she was filming When Harry Met Sally.