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by Val Ellicott
Staff Writer
William Kennedy Smith's accuser saw someone
standing at an upstairs window of the Kennedy family house while
Smith raped her on the lawn below, her stepfather said last month.
"She said when she was on the ground and she
was screaming, there was a person standing in the window, one of the
upper rooms," the stepfather told one of Smith's attorneys in a
deposition released Wednesday.
His statement may clarify, for the first time, why
the woman would have said "he was watching, he was watching"
when she described the alleged rape to Anne Mercer, the friend who
met her at the Kennedy estate shortly after the incident.
Mercer said she was under the impression the woman
was referring to Sen. Ted Kennedy, who also was staying at the house
that weekend. It is more likely, however, that the eyewitness was
Patrick Barry, another guest at the estate.
The woman said she does not recall telling Mercer
that anyone watched the alleged rape, which took place in the
pre-dawn hours of March 30. She did tell police she knew the senator
was somewhere inside the house and she could not understand why he
did not respond to her screams.
"I remember thinking, `I'm screaming my head
off and why isn't anybody coming down here and stopping this,"'
the woman said. "I knew that Ted Kennedy had been there. Why
wasn't he coming down to do this?"
Her stepfather is apparently the only person who
has heard the woman describe, in some detail, the presence of an eyewitness.
"She swore she could see somebody in the
window upstairs while she was being attacked," said the
stepfather, a wealthy, retired industrialist originally from the
Midwest. He and the woman's mother are not named in this article to
protect the woman's identity.
In her conversation with her stepfather, the woman
said she assumed the eyewitness was Sen. Kennedy, the stepfather told
defense attorney Mark Schnapp Nov. 20.
Sen. Kennedy's bedroom was downstairs. But Barry
was in a room upstairs.
Barry told state prosecutor Moira Lasch on April 30
that he looked out his window after going to the bathroom early March
30 and saw an indistinct shape near the estate's swimming pool, the
same area where the woman says Smith raped her.
The shape "looked like two people either lying
next to each other or you know, one on top of the other," he said.
Barry said he looked out the window for about 10
seconds before going back to bed. He said he did not hear anything
that would indicate a rape was taking place.
The woman, who lives in Jupiter, also told her
mother that she thought someone had watched the alleged rape, the
mother said in a deposition taken on Oct. 18. But the mother did not
recall details.
Schnapp did not pursue the revelation that there
might have been an eyewitness to the alleged rape. That might be
because testimony that places Smith and woman on the lawn together
would contradict the defense' s contention that he and the woman had
consensual sex on the beach.
Schnapp spent a great deal of time grilling the
stepfather about past federal investigations of his company, his
feelings about the Kennedy family and any opinions about the Kennedys
that he might have passed on to his stepdaughter.
The stepfather said his own father had felt some
rancor towards Joseph Kennedy, because he believed Joseph Kennedy had
given him advice that, had he acted on it, would have caused him to
lose a large amount of money. Joseph Kennedy is Smith's deceased grandfather.
"Is it your understanding that your father
felt that Joe Kennedy was trying to mislead him in some way?"
Schnapp asked the stepfather.
"I believe he felt that way," the
stepfather said.
He said he disagrees with the Kennedys' political
views and admitted to having a critical opinion of what he described
as President John Kennedy's "sexual activities."
But he said he couldn't recall whether he discussed
these impressions with his stepdaughter.
The stepfather also said a polygraph examiner was
mistaken when he said the Jupiter woman described him as oppressive
in an interview. In that statement and others, she was referring to
her natural father, the stepfather told Schnapp.
He also said he never criticized his stepdaughter
for accepting Smith' s invitation to see the inside of the Kennedy
house at about 3 a.m. March 30, shortly before the alleged rape.
"The Kennedy family is known
internationally," the woman's stepfather said. "There isn't
a young girl in the whole world that wouldn't have done that and many
older ones would have done it too."
He said the woman, who began testifying Wednesday,
told him she is afraid of seeing Smith in court.
"She says, `I know it's not logical for me to
be afraid of him, but I am.' "
*Kennedy Smith case
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