The media circus continued. The woman who said she had been raped on Easter weekend by a nephew of Sen. Ted Kennedy remained in seclusion, and so did the man she named, 30-year-old William Kennedy Smith. They traded accusations through their lawyers in statements that became instant tabloid headlines: he said her story was a “damnable lie,” and she said his denial was “100 percent false.” Meanwhile, her lawyer and several of her friends flocked to TV talk shows to hash over the night the alleged victim went to Au Bar, the trendy nightspot, and drank with Willie, his Uncle Ted and Ted’s son Patrick. Smith’s lawyer talked only for print, but Smith’s college roommate turned up to analyze him for Geraldo Rivera.
The Palm Beach police finally released their initial report of the woman’s complaint, most of which had already leaked. She said she drove Smith back to the family mansion at 3:30 a.m., they walked on the beach, and he stripped and plunged into the ocean. Then, as she told it, she decided it was time to leave, only to be chased across the lawn, tackled and raped beside the pool. The clinical details were graphic.
The police said they were waiting for results on tests on Smith’s hair and blood samples, due this week, before deciding whether to file charges. Meanwhile, what had seemed a cover-up to some was looking more like a case of ineptitude on Keystone Cops scale. At the weekend, nearly two weeks after the alleged rape, the crime-scene unit finally turned up at the mansion to hunt for clues. It had rained at least seven times since the incident, and the lawn had been mowed twice.
Smith’s lawyer hired private eyes, headed by ex-FBI man Tom Myers, to dig up any dirt on the alleged victim, her family and the friends who were with the party or helped take her home in the dawn. Her defenders assailed this as a heavy-handed effort to intimidate witnesses and exploit the sex life of a victim. But Myers said righteously that “if seeking the truth is intimidation, we will continue to seek the truth.” A story spread that the alleged victim had been seen kissing Smith goodnight, a detail that would seriously undermine her story if true; but several women in Smith’s past approached NEWSWEEK and other media, offering stories about his proclivities. A supermarket tabloid, The National Enquirer, printed one in which a woman, identified as a former medical-school classmate, accused him of date rape. His lawyer declined to comment.
If all that mud were slung in a formal trial, one lawyer joked, it would be “the legal equivalent of nuclear warfare–mutual assured destruction.” Accordingly, speculation was growing about ways to back off. One prospect: a Florida legal procedure called “withheld adjudication,” often used for first offenders. The accused is allowed to plead guilty or no contest and is sentenced, usually to a long probation. But the verdict is not recorded:if the suspect keeps a clean slate, he has no felony record. But any such scenario was still to play out. At the weekend, the only thing postponed was the closing of Au Bar. The place was to have been shuttered for the off season, but it will stay open for at least two weeks. The tourists and the hordes of reporters were lapping up too much to stop now.
