Smith met Bowman at a neighborhood bar throughout a go to he made Easter weekend together with his senator uncle Ted and cousin Patrick Kennedy. Smith invited Bowman again to the property, with its 11-bedroom home, swimming pool, tennis court docket, and 200 ft of beachfront property. Whereas there, Bowman claimed that Smith chased her throughout the grounds, tackled her, pinned her, pulled up her gown, and raped her. Bowman handed two polygraph assessments on her statements to police and had bruises on her legs, shoulders, and arms.
Dominick Dunne lined the trial for this journal, reporting how the Kennedy household got here out en masse to help Smith: “They gave an unprecedented show of solidarity mixed with stardom, waving on the press, smiling on the photographers, any one among them succesful at any second of stepping in entrance of the financial institution of microphones and addressing the multitudes,” wrote Dunne.
Smith was in the end acquitted—not a shock given his costly protection lawyer Roy Black, his household clout, and this element from Dunne: “From the second on the primary day of the trial when Choose Mary Lupo disallowed, with out remark, the testimony of three different girls—a health care provider, a medical scholar, and a regulation scholar who on the time was the girlfriend of Smith’s cousin Matthew Maxwell Kennedy—who claimed they had been sexually assaulted by Smith between 1983 and 1988, the die was forged. Solely the velocity with which the jury of six folks chosen to resolve Smith’s destiny arrived at their choice was a shock: a mere seventy-seven minutes, together with the time it took to choose a foreman.” (On the time, Smith, by way of Black, denied the three girls’s allegations.)
(In a weird postscript, Black married one of many jurors who discovered Smith not responsible, Lea Black, in 1994. Black later grew to become a member of The Actual Housewives of Miami.)
Bowman later advised Dunne, “It’s the acquittal that cash should purchase. [Smith’s team] had 9 months to provide you with their story…. He had 5 of my statements and everyone else’s statements. He had the forensic proof. He had all types of assets, which they’ve already testified that they used. He had all this materials with which to concoct a narrative. And that’s what he did…. All the things I couldn’t bear in mind, due to rape-trauma syndrome, he may provide you with one thing for. All the things that slot in with the forensic proof, he discovered a solution for it.”
In 2015, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in his e book RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Darkish Facet of the Dream that JFK Jr. had been blackmailed into attending the trial to help his cousin. James Ridgway de Szigethy, an acquaintance of JFK Jr., advised Congress that he recalled his pal saying that the household “‘ought to have finished one thing about Willie years in the past when he first began doing this,’ which means…raping girls.” De Szigethy stated that JFK Jr. “advised me he didn’t need to [support his cousin at trial] and his mom didn’t need him to, both. I steered that he not do it since Willie was responsible, however he advised me who was pressuring and why.” Oppenheimer continued with De Szigethy’s assertion to Congress: