Sen. Kennedy Takes Stand at Rape Trial

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his son Patrick described for a jury Friday their late-night visit with family member William Kennedy Smith to a fashionable nightclub where Smith met a woman who would later accuse him of rape.

Sen. Kennedy said he saw or heard nothing that night to indicate a rape had occurred, and his son said Smith had told him only that a woman he had met was acting strangely and telling “bizarre” tales.

The appearance by the Kennedys on the fifth day of the trial came as a major counterpoint to the testimony of the woman, who said Smith had raped her on the east lawn of the Kennedy’s oceanfront mansion shortly before dawn March 30 after she drove him home from the club.

Sen. Kennedy testified he had asked his son and nephew to join him for a nightcap in town to break the dark mood of discussions about the death of Smith’s father, Stephen Smith, last year.

“I wish I’d gone for a long walk on the beach,” the 60-year-old Massachusetts Democrat told a six-member jury. “But I went to Au Bar instead,” he said.

In an important point for his nephew’s defense, Kennedy testified, as he had in sworn statements earlier, that he heard no screams or unusual noises late that night outside his bedroom window after returning from the club. His room overlooked the lawn where Smith’s accuser says she tried in vain to fight off his advances.

Otherwise, Kennedy had little to offer that might bear on the defendant’s guilt or innocence; Kennedy said he left Au Bar before Smith did and did not see him again that night.

Kennedy’s 45-minute, monotone account slowed only when it came to a mention of Stephen Smith, and, at another point, in reference to the assassination of his brother Robert F. Kennedy.

“This was a very special weekend for us,” the senator explained, because it was the first time that he had been with Stephen Smith’s family since the death of his sister Jean’s husband seven months earlier. And after the conversation that the family had following dinner, “a whole range of memories came in an overwhelming wave of emotion,” Kennedy said.

When lead defense attorney Roy E. Black asked Kennedy to explain again the discussion of the death of Smith, the senator stopped, looked down and hesitated for long seconds. He seemed unable to go on. “I described it earlier,” Kennedy finally said, his voice strained and husky.

He wasn’t the only one who seemed overcome by feeling. At the defense table 15 feet from him, William Kennedy Smith brushed the corner of his eyes and wiped his nose. But a teardrop soon streaked Smith’s left cheek. He took several deep breaths and swallowed hard.

“We’re a very close family,” Kennedy explained softly as his nephew watched him with riveted attention.

The senator was a prosecution witness, and Assistant State Atty. Moira K. Lasch again led him to describe the facts of his five-day Easter weekend visit to the high-walled family mansion at 1095 N. Ocean Blvd. in Palm Beach, Fla. His account, largely the same as those in his earlier depositions, showed some inconsistency with the timing and facts of others’ memories of the evening.

But if his story was imperfect, it did not seem to change the sympathetic emotion of the moment in the courtroom. The prosecutor, who earlier in the trial denounced the Kennedy “machine” and spoke of a Chappaquiddick style “cover-up,” referring to the events surrounding the automobile accident in which Sen. Kennedy’s female companion was killed in 1969, seemed awed and respectful.

Some legal observers wondered whether the prosecution had blundered in calling him. “The big question is, why did Sen. Kennedy testify?” asked Frank Kessler, a Palm Beach County defense attorney and former prosecutor. “Maybe Ms. Lasch had a grand scheme there; I don’t see it.”

If anything, experts said, the senator’s appearance seemed to generate compassion for the family while doing nothing to bolster the state’s case.

As he has before, Kennedy said he saw no evidence that night that a rape had occurred. He maintained he had left the mansion before midnight and was in bed by 2:30 a.m. Many other witnesses, including family friends and, in testimony this week, an Au Bar disc jockey and parking attendant, said Patrick Kennedy and the senator didn’t leave the saloon until after 3 a.m.

Kennedy said he did not see his nephew escorting a woman around the grounds; William Kennedy Smith’s accuser, who testified earlier this week, said she saw the senator and his son in the kitchen of the home and on a patio near the sea wall. The senator said he, Patrick and Michelle Cassone, a woman Patrick had met at the club, left Smith behind at Au Bar and returned to the estate. He said they had a glass of wine on the patio near the sea wall and that he then retired. As he was going to bed, Kennedy said, he looked in Patrick’s room and surprised his son and Cassone necking.

It was the end of a somewhat unpleasant evening, the elder Kennedy said. He recounted a spat at Au Bar with Anne Mercer, a friend of the victim. The disagreement, he said, took place when Patrick and Sen. Kennedy sat at her table because the senator’s back had made it difficult for him to continue standing.

When Kennedy introduced his son as a state representative, he said, Mercer had shot back, “Am I supposed to be impressed?” In her version of the fight, Kennedy had chastised her with, “You don’t know anything about world politics” and stalked off.