Published May 16, 1991|Updated Oct. 13, 2005
There are a few facts upon which almost everyone agrees. Late the night of March 29, Sen. Ted Kennedy woke his son and his nephew and asked them to go out for a couple of beers. The three went to a Palm Beach nightclub, Au Bar, where they met two women who later returned to the Kennedy estate with them.
Amanda Smith, the senator's niece, told police the family later joked about "how Teddy got them out of bed and took them to Au Bar."
That's where the accounts begin to diverge.
On March 30, Palm Beach police received a rape report that would set off a firestorm of controversy.
The woman making the report said she had been assaulted while visiting the Kennedy family compound. The assailant, she said, was William Kennedy Smith, a 30-year-old medical student and nephew of Sen. Kennedy.
As the days passed what started as a rape report ballooned into a nationwide debate on the rights of victims, the responsibilities of the media and the nature of the crime of rape.
A supermarket tabloid, the Globe, named the 29-year-old woman, whose identity had been no secret to the media hordes massed outside her home. NBC News followed suit and the New York Times weighed in with a profile of the woman that even reported her driving record and the titles of books in her child's bedroom.
The New York Times drew extensive criticism for the story, and editors later expressed regret that the profile led many readers to think the paper was challenging the woman's account. But the paper stood by its decision to identify and investigate the woman.
The organizations that identified the woman said they were doing so because they wanted people to have all the facts in the case, facts that would presumably allow them to make their own decisions about what happened that day.
That would not be an easy task. As time goes on, there are more and more conflicting reports.
Was it rape or consensual sex? Did someone hear the woman scream? Did Ted Kennedy know the day of the report that Smith was under police investigation?
Here are the accounts of some of the people involved. The statements are from the woman who accused Smith; Smith; Sen. Kennedy, D-Mass., and his son, Rhode Island state Rep. Patrick Kennedy; the accuser's friend, Anne Mercer, who was called to the estate to pick up the woman after the reported attack; Michele Cassone, a waitress who accompanied Patrick Kennedy to the estate; and Patrick Barry, son of William Barry, the estate's security chief.
Most of the statements are from hundreds of pages of police reports, depositions and interviews that have been released to the public. Other remarks were made directly to the media.
The woman who accuses Smith
The woman says she met Smith at Au Bar, then gave him a ride to the Kennedy compound because his uncle and brother had already left the nightclub.
At the oceanfront compound, she accepted Smith's suggestion they walk to the beach. She says she declined Smith's offer to take a swim and left the beach as he began taking off his clothing.
As she walked, she told a detective, she reflected on meeting Smith. "I've had a nice night with a nice guy," she thought. "It would be nice if he called again, but, hey, let's be realistic, he's a Kennedy."
She was climbing a staircase from the beach when, she said, Smith grabbed her.
The woman says Smith tackled her as she ran across the estate lawn, then raped her. She says she screamed and told him "no" and to stop. She says she remembers wondering why no one in the house would come out to help her.
The woman says she was able to escape into the kitchen, where she called a friend, Anne Mercer, who had been at Au Bar with her that night. Mercer and her boyfriend drove to the compound.
The woman says Smith grabbed her before she was able to leave. She says she told him that he had raped her and he replied that he did not, and that no one would believe her anyway.
The woman said the incident stirred upsetting memories of a childhood beating by her father, who accused her of spilling air freshener on furniture.
"He said I did it and I had no idea what I'd done, and I had those same feelings when he (Smith) grabbed me in the kitchen."
After Mercer picked her up, the woman eventually called a rape crisis line. At 2:30 that afternoon, about 10{ hours after she said the rape occurred, the incident was reported to police.
William Kennedy Smith
Smith has declined to give a statement to investigators.
He has called the woman's allegations "an outrageous lie" and says he never abused her or used force. He does not deny having had sexual intercourse with her.
"I didn't commit an offense of any kind," Smith has said to reporters, "and I'm confident that that's going to come out."
Smith is charged with second-degree sexual battery.
Sen. Ted Kennedy
It was Kennedy's idea to go to Au Bar, according to investigators' reports. Kennedy roused his son and Smith from a sound sleep so they could accompany him, the reports say.
The senator said it was about 11:30 p.m. when he went to the pair's bedroom "and I asked them if they wanted to have a couple of beers." Other members of the Kennedy household said it was after 2 a.m.
Kennedy says that after the group arrived at Au Bar he had an argument with Anne Mercer, a friend of the woman who reported the rape.
"We had a brief but heated exchange in conversation. I felt that she had, when she had been introduced to my son, Patrick, she had slighted him a bit, was rude to him."
Asked by Palm Beach County prosecutor Moira Lasch why he felt that way, Kennedy said it was "just her attitude." She was "unfriendly," he said.
Kennedy says Smith was with him and his son when they entered the bar but "split" soon afterward and did not come home with them.
Later at the house, Kennedy shared a glass of wine with his son, Patrick, and Michele Cassone, whom Patrick Kennedy had invited there.
After 20 minutes of small talk, Sen. Kennedy stopped briefly in the kitchen for a snack and then retired for the night.
Later, Kennedy said, he arose, clad in a nightshirt, and walked to the room his son was sharing with Smith to see if his nephew had returned, and found his son and Cassone. He said he didn't have a "clear recollection" of what he saw or heard in the room.
Kennedy has said he didn't hear or see any evidence of a rape at the estate.
"I never, never heard her scream," Kennedy said. "I slept all the way through until the next morning."
Despite repeated avowals that initially he knew nothing of a rape complaint, the senator said in a sworn deposition a month later that he knew the day after the rape report that the possibility of "a serious offense" was under investigation, and that he had been advised that the police wanted to speak to him and his nephew about it.
Officers who went to the house March 31 said they were told at first that the senator was not there.
At one point they were told by a family friend, William Barry, that the senator had already left town, when in fact he was at the estate. The senator contended that Barry might have been confused about travel plans. (Prosecutors are considering an obstruction-of-justice charge against Barry.)
Documents released Tuesday undermine the early declarations by the senator and his son that they knew nothing of the woman and her allegations by showing that, even on Easter Sunday (March 31), they discussed the encounter she had with Smith.
In the deposition, the senator said that within hours after the police made their first inquiries at the house on March 31, he had a telephone conversation with Smith in which Smith said, "You know, there's some allegations against me."
The senator responded, "I have heard that."
When Smith offered to tell him "the whole story," the senator demurred and instead advised his nephew, "You better tell the whole story to someone, to Marvin Rosen," refering to a prominent Florida lawyer whom the Massachusetts senator had already contacted about the case.
The senator left Palm Beach the next day without speaking to the police and he has repeatedly insisted that he had no idea that police were investigating a rape until hours after he was back in Washington. In a public statement a few days later the senator said he had "no idea" who the alleged victim was. Similarly, in his first public statement on the case, Patrick Kennedy said, "the girl is not someone I know."
In their depositions both the senator and his son recall being introduced to the woman at Au Bar.
In a statement Wednesday, Kennedy said: "There is no truth to suggestions that I attempted to interfere at any time with the police investigation into the charges against Willie Smith. To the contrary, as soon as I became aware that the police wished to speak with me, I made arrangements to talk with them, and I have cooperated fully with them ever since."
Anne Mercer
Mercer provides a different account of her Au Bar discussion with Kennedy.
"Okay, I was sitting at a table waiting for (the woman) and Chuck (Desiderio, Mercer's boyfriend) to get off the dance floor and Sen. Kennedy and Patrick sat down next to me. . . . I didn't say anything to them . . . Patrick looked like he was having a terrible time . . . and I said to him, jokingly, "You look like you're having a great time,' and Sen. Kennedy said to me . . . "Who are you to say anything?' "
Mercer says that when she went to the estate to pick up the woman after the reported rape, she went into the house and confronted Smith, saying, "What did you do to my friend?"
Patrick Kennedy
He described the woman who was to accuse Smith of rape as acting "weird" and frightening.
Patrick Kennedy said the woman was "really whacked out," but it wasn't clear whether he was referring to her behavior before or after she said she was raped.
Kennedy, a Rhode Island state legislator, said he and Smith were worried when the alleged victim returned to the estate after Smith had said good night to her and she left the home in her own car.
"She was standing there to everyone's amazement and shock. She had let herself in the house which, quite frankly, scared me," Kennedy said under questioning in New York by Moira Lasch, the lead Palm Beach County prosecutor in the case.
"In my view, this was . . . sort of a Fatal Attraction you couldn't get rid of and (she) was saying all sorts of wild things," Kennedy said. He referred to the popular movie in which an obsessed woman stalks the married lover who spurned her.
He said Smith told him the woman called him by different names, demanded he show his driver's license to prove he is a Kennedy and acted "really whacked out."
Kennedy said he went to bed while Smith stayed up with her about an hour until two friends came to pick her up. Smith told him the woman said she had called police because "she was angry" with Smith.
Smith told him, Kennedy recounted, "God, I wish I had gone to bed earlier and this girl is, you know, really whacked out."
Patrick Kennedy said he "assumed" that Smith and the woman had sex because of a comment Smith made to him the next morning.
Then the prosecutor asked, "Why would your cousin have wanted to have sex with a "whacked-out' weirdo that you called a "Fatal Attraction?' "
"I don't know," Patrick Kennedy replied.
He said he did not ask Smith for any details Saturday morning about what happened between him and the woman .
"That didn't fit into the context of a new day that was bright," he said. "We just had a tennis game scheduled and you know, I just never gave it a second thought."
Michele Cassone
Cassone went to the Kennedy estate after leaving Au Bar. She said she was kissing Patrick Kennedy in a bedroom at the estate when Sen. Kennedy walked in.
Asked how the senator appeared, she said: "Very drunk and very weird . . . He had no pants on.
"I don't know, I just presumed he was drunk, he was kinda wobbling . . . he came into the room and he's just like staring at us and he . . . had his shirt, just his long oxford shirt and I don't know what he had under that but he didn't have his slacks on any longer . . . I just thought that was a very strange thing and I wanted to get out of there."
Cassone said she never took her clothes off nor did she have intercourse with Patrick Kennedy.
Cassone sold her account of the night to tabloids and television shows, charging up to $1,000 per television appearance. The appearances stopped after a television reporter on A Current Affair unearthed nude photographs of her.
Patrick Barry
The son of former FBI agent and longtime Kennedy family friend William Barry described looking out an estate window when he got up to use the bathroom in the early morning of March 30.
"I didn't know at first what I thought, I thought it might have been two people . . . just shapes that looked like people."
Asked what he meant, he replied: "I couldn't really tell what they _ just looked like two people either lying next to each other or . . . one on top of the other, I couldn't tell, because it was pretty dark."
He said he heard no screams.
Three houseguests have told investigators that the windows are always open at the estate and normal conversations outside easily can be heard inside.
_ Information from AP, Newsday, New York Times and Washington Post was used in this report.
