Smith Rape Case Accuser Has Last Word

Defense attorneys for William Kennedy Smith on Thursday attacked the woman who accused him of rape with testimony that depicted her as a troubled unwed mother who needed to “get a life,” was haunted by memory flashbacks and dated “a lot of bartenders.”

But though she broke down in tears repeatedly and once begged her questioner to quickly end his examination, the 30-year-old Jupiter, Fla., woman clung to the basics of her account of how Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s nephew raped her on the lawn of the family’s oceanfront estate. And she had the last words in her more than 4 1/2 hours of stormy cross-examination by lead defense attorney Roy E. Black:

“What he did to me was wrong,” she said. And then, pointing a finger at Smith: “I don’t want to live the rest of my life in fear of that man and I don’t want to be responsible for him doing it to someone else.

“Your client raped me,” she declared to Black, just before the judge told her she could step down.

In the fourth day of the trial, Smith’s attorney tried to show a series of inconsistencies and gaps in the woman’s story. Black bore into details that he said she had invented after seeing other witnesses’ testimony or specifics that he suggested she had conveniently forgotten.

Once when she explained that she could not remember some detail because of the trauma she had suffered, he interrupted: “I know you want to give that speech each time.”

“It’s not a speech--it’s the truth,” countered the woman, who shook again and again with sobs as she recalled the events of the night.

When Black began to ask her questions about how Smith had hurt her during the alleged assault, she broke down.

“Do you want a recess?” asked Black.

“Sir, please, please, help me get this over with,” begged the woman, who was wearing a dark blue suit and a white blouse for her appearance Thursday in the Palm Beach County Courthouse.

However, Judge Mary E. Lupo then ordered a third recess to allow the woman to compose herself.

The television pool feed of the trial has attempted to conceal the woman’s identity with a gray cloud that covers her face on television screens. On Wednesday and Thursday that cloud failed to follow her movement and occasionally her face was briefly visible to some viewers. On Thursday, CNN, which aired the trial, enlarged the gray cloud with a blue one that succeeded in obscuring her face.

Trying to establish the woman’s romantic interest in Smith, Black questioned her about a police statement that she had said that the day before the alleged assault, the woman’s mother and her counselor had urged her to get out of the house more and “get a life.”

In fiery redirect testimony, however, prosecutor Moira K. Lasch ridiculed Black’s suggestion that the woman had sought an affair with Smith.

“Do you suppose that going to a bar and picking up a man for sex was your idea of getting a life?” the prosecutor asked, her voice trembling with emotion. “Did your counselor ever say it would be therapeutic for you to have a one-night stand on March 30?

“Was that your idea of getting a life?” she went on. “Was that the way you were raised?”

The witness firmly denied those ideas.

In his cross-examination Black tried to establish these inconsistencies:

--Although the woman now says she cannot remember where she took off the black Givenchy pantyhose that she wore that evening, in earlier sworn statements she had said that she took them off while she was in her car or in the kitchen of the Kennedy estate.

--She told police in three sworn statements that she had wondered if Smith would ask for her phone number that evening. Now she says she had only a “friendly” interest in him, partly because she thought that the 31-year-old medical student could help her unhealthy 2-year-old daughter.

--The rape would have been impossible if, as she claimed, Smith was holding an arm with one hand, pinning her other arm against her body, lifting her dress, pushing aside her panties, and trying to enter her with a half-erect penis.

--She had told police on the afternoon of March 30 that the rape had taken place about 10 feet from the mansion. Now she says she cannot remember where the assault occurred.

--She did not change her underwear until 2 p.m. the following day when she was examined at Humana Hospital, although she complained several times in her testimony that the rape made her feel “dirty.”

--She testified that after the assault she had confronted Smith in the study of the house, saying, by mistake: “You raped me, Michael.” In earlier testimony she did not say she used the name.

In pretrial hearings, the judge ruled that the defense could not bring up the fact that the woman’s child was born out of wedlock because of a state law that bars irrelevant facts about the accuser’s past in sex crime cases. But the woman acknowledged her unmarried status as Black questioned her about her sworn statement that the child’s father had “abandoned her” during her pregnancy.

Black also worked in a suggestion that the woman had an active night life as he tried to establish that contrary to her testimony, she had arranged a rendezvous with a bartender named Tony Liott.

“You’ve been to plenty of bars in your life. . . . You even go out with a number of bartenders,” Black said.

Earlier, Lasch had asked: “Is it a great pickup line at a bar to tell someone you have an infant child to take care of?”

To objections from Black, she had asked the accuser whether she wants “to be remembered forever as the woman who was raped by William Kennedy Smith.” The woman said firmly that she did not, and a moment later added: “Everybody in the world knows what has happened to me. . . . How am I going to let my daughter grow up” knowing her mother was raped?