Palm Beach Follies : Mud Is Flying Everywhere in William Kennedy Smith’s Rape Trial

Before it all began, Mary E. Lupo was known in these parts as a respectable lower-court jurist, a churchgoing mother of two and a tap-dance aficionado. Now she’s the “scowling judge” of Palm Beach County, and a sour concoction served at a local saloon is her namesake.

Before it all began, Assistant State Atty. Moira Lasch was known as the early-rising, clean-living former Florida Prosecutor of the Year. These days, she’s held out by some lawyers as the living paradigm of how to antagonize judges and flout rules of pretrial publicity.

Before the William Kennedy Smith case, Susan Kennedy--no relation--was a genial small-town publicist. South Florida now remembers her as the Kennedy’s case one-woman gossip switchboard, the unzipped lip who went on a local radio talk show to bruit unconfirmed talk that what happened at the Kennedy estate was in fact an orgy.

It has all been part of the epic mud bath that has spattered reputations along the 14 miles of this palm-fringed, tiara-topped island since a 30-year-old woman accused Smith, a 31-year-old medical school graduate, seven months ago.

Some have been humiliated, others only mildly embarrassed. But nearly no one near the case has been able to escape this defamation derby: not the accused or the accuser, the local constabulary, waitresses, retirees, salesclerks, drug dealers, businessmen, heiresses or even some members of the media.

Already, the case record has dredged up--quite apart from allegations about the two principals--references to wife beating, drug dealing and drug abuse, chronic alcoholism, assaults on police officers, date rape and racketeering.

All this has not exactly fostered harmony in Palm Beach. The town may top all others in per-capita charitable contributions, but now it is a place where shivs are drawn and teeth are bared. A return of civility is not expected until the trial’s end in late December.

“I’ve worried about the way all this has grown,” says Frank Wright, a Palm Beach civic pillar and founder of the local Kiwanis Club. “It’s been like a spider web: At first, it was about two people. But as time has passed, it has caught more and more others.”

More may be snared as well. “If the truth is embarrassing, embarrassing it may be,” defense counsel Roy Black announced with a chilling nonchalance in August. “And it is going to come out in this courtroom.”

The target practice has most often been aimed at the accuser and Smith, who is the nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). Smith is accused of raping the alleged victim March 30 at the oceanfront estate after a Good Friday eve wassail with his uncle and cousin, Patrick J. Kennedy. In July the prosecution released sworn statements accusing him of raping another woman and sexually assaulting two others between 1983 and 1988.

The defense has fought back by trying to portray Smith’s accuser as a promiscuous, drug-abusing man-hater who has defamed him because of his family’s renown. The punishing charge and countercharge between the legal squads have set the tone for the entire proceeding.

Lasch, not one to lose time currying favor, helpfully volunteered early in the case that Lupo had less experience with criminal cases than she and ought to follow her advice. Soon after, Lasch was complaining that the judge had failed to read some of her filings--and in August, she moved that the judge should quit the case because her “scowling, glaring and frowning” showed an obvious prejudice for the defense.

Lupo has since remained strictly expressionless when addressing prosecutors, in contrast to her continuing broad smiles and exaggerated eyelash-batting in the direction of the defense table.

Other aspects of Lupo’s judicial comportment have come under painfully close scrutiny. The Palm Beach Post pointed out that when she was a traffic court judge, she would tell hapless speeders to stand up straight and send them home if their clothing was too casual.

Police Chief Joseph Terlizzese has been scolded by defense counsel in a pretrial hearing for telling reporters last April that he was “99% sure” that a crime had been committed, though no charges had been filed at that time. (He says he was misquoted.)

And Officer Craig Gunkel, the Police Department spokesman, was called to account by the defense for allowing himself to be filmed by the tabloid TV show “A Current Affair” in a re-enactment of the alleged rape.

If that wasn’t enough of an assault on the constable’s dignity, the defense has harped on Gunkel’s nickname, “Uncle Gunkel.”

Also enduring a string of indignities is Anne Mercer, the erstwhile salesclerk who rushed to the Kennedy estate to help the alleged victim.

She was entertaining bids for her story for as much as $150,000 in the early weeks of the case. But the value plummeted when the police released her statement, and she had to settle for $25,000 from “A Current Affair.”

Her personality was not shown in the best light when it was disclosed that she and Sen. Kennedy had gotten into a ugly row at Au Bar, the nightclub where Smith first encountered the alleged victim. According to Mercer, the tiff started with her acid observation to Patrick Kennedy about his wallflower party manners.

Said she: “You look like you’re having a lot of fun.”

Retorted Sen. Kennedy: “Who are you to talk? What do you know about world politics?”

“She can be caustic,” Nathaniel Read, an unemployed developer and Au Bar regular, remarked in his deposition.

Also unflattering to Mercer was her nasty falling-out with her former friends Ashley Murphy and Murphy’s boyfriend, Kenneth Brown, over the case. Mercer became furious with Murphy for telling lawyers that Mercer didn’t believe the victim’s allegation that she had been raped. To make it worse, Mercer became convinced that Murphy had sold her telephone number--among others--to reporters.

Mercer had at least some grounds for this suspicion, since a reporter for the supermarket tabloid the Globe paid Murphy $1,000 cash for the victim’s name one night at Au Bar, Murphy acknowledged in court papers.

According to Brown, Mercer voiced her displeasure with her former friend in a series of shrieking phone calls, including one in which she allegedly referred to Brown as a “used prophylactic,” denounced Murphy as a “publicity hound” and demanded of Brown: “If you’re her boyfriend, control her.”

“Anne just screams and yells all the time,” Murphy said in court papers. “She’s just one of those kinds of people.”

Murphy, an unemployed interior designer who was receiving an allowance from her father, may have some image problems of her own if she gets on the stand to explain why she told defense lawyers she believes the victim was promiscuous.

She’ll have to explain why she cited the Fifth Amendment when asked about her own alleged cocaine use. She would have to explain to a jury, too, about the night she and an ex-boyfriend were arrested for disturbing the peace and police held her in leg restraints.

Brown also may be called to the witness box to corroborate Murphy’s initial story that Mercer told her that the victim’s accusation was a lie. Brown, a wealthy 35-year-old businessman, allegedly was with Murphy at the time Murphy and Mercer first discussed the accusation.

But an appearance on the stand may not do much for the image of Brown, who was one of the case’s more combative witnesses.

In a deposition, Brown concurred with his girlfriend’s assessment of the alleged victim’s morality because of the daughter the accuser has reared without a husband. “I don’t condone the rearing of bastards,” he sniffed.

Brown had a tiff with prosecutor Lasch during the deposition, when she refused to allow him to talk to her off the record. “Let the record reflect that Mr. Brown thought it was appropriate to blow me a kiss across the room,” Lasch commented at one point.

Brown also volunteered that he had his own opinion about women who cry rape, because of a time when a woman he had picked up in a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., bar falsely accused him to police.

“The next morning I couldn’t get her to leave my apartment,” he said. “She started screaming rape.”

Brown said in court papers that he was supposed to have a “terrible” reputation among some “gossipy . . . envious people” already, because of his friendship with his girlfriend’s father, Leonard Mercer. The elder Mercer, also at Au Bar the night of the alleged crime, went to jail on racketeering charges for paying a kickback to get a Teamsters pension fund loan to buy a Palm Beach nightclub called Ta-boo.

The reputation of another likely witness, former waitress Michelle Cassone, can’t afford much more damage.

Cassone went to the Kennedy estate for several hours with Patrick Kennedy early on the morning of March 30 and became a celebrity as the witness who told police she had seen Sen. Kennedy wearing only a shirt, walking “kinda wobbly.”

After a barrage of TV show appearances, she lost her job; was caught battering the front door of Au Bar; bit the finger of “Current Affair” reporter Stephen Dunleavy for displaying nude photos a boyfriend had taken of her, and was arrested for violating her probation for driving violations. Last month she was hospitalized for taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Nathaniel Read, the developer, may be called to describe what he saw at Au Bar on March 30. But he would probably be just as happy leaving out the tangled details of his mercurial romance with Cassone.

Read recounted in court papers last July that he had been trying unsuccessfully to end his romance with Cassone. In the climactic scene, a hysterical Cassone nearly plunged off the top of a spiral staircase at his home. Police were called, and two patrols cars came to arrest Read. He was released the next day.

Unfriendly as this confrontation would seem to be, it did not apparently end the relationship between Read and Cassone. Read explained to puzzled lawyers during his deposition in July that, yes, he had gotten a lift to the deposition hearing from Cassone. His Porsche, he explained, was in the shop.

But although the case has not highlighted the harmony among the Palm Beach set, it has demonstrated the group’s insistence on traveling in proper company.

Helga Wagner, a Palm Beach Kennedy friend, may be called in the trial to discuss what happened on the afternoon of March 30, when she lunched at the Kennedy compound, and March 31, when the senator went to her home for a cocktail party.

Wagner, who owns a jewelry shop on posh Worth Avenue, expressed sympathy for the Kennedys in her sworn statement on the case. But she seemed to reserve her greatest emotion to describe the consternation she felt when a friend showed up with an unacceptable guest at the cocktail party Kennedy was attending.

This guest was “a horrible man,” she complained. “I mean, so boisterous. I’ve known him from New York, from London. . . . Everywhere you walk, all of a sudden, he’s there. You can’t escape him.”