The House of Kennedy(65)
The senator rustles up his son Patrick and his nephew Willie and persuades them to join him for a bachelor boys’ night out.
It’s been twenty-two years since Chappaquiddick. Ted and Joan divorced in 1983, and their oldest son, Ted Jr., now a lawyer, has long since recovered from his childhood diagnosis of bone cancer which resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Their daughter, Kara, is a TV producer working with her aunt Jean, Willie’s mother, at Very Special Arts, the international organization on arts, education, and disability that Jean founded in 1974.
In a matter of twenty-four hours, between now and Easter Sunday, another Kennedy scandal will unfold, one that will dominate national print headlines and television news crawls.
This time, a Kennedy will go on trial for rape.
But for now, the trio hits the town for a late supper, then a few drinks at Au Bar, a trendy Palm Beach watering hole known as a magnet for the nouveau riche and B-list celebrities like Donald Trump’s recent ex-wife, Ivana, or Roxanne Pulitzer, whose scandalous 1980s divorce made the front pages of every tabloid with claims she’d been kinky with a trumpet.
The fifty-nine-year-old senator orders his usual double Chivas Regal on the rocks, while Patrick chats with twenty-seven-year-old Michele Cassone, and Willie meets a twenty-nine-year-old single mother named Patricia Bowman. Willie tells her he’s about to become a doctor, and Bowman tells him about her two-year-old daughter’s health problems.
“I really felt like I could trust him. He seemed to be an intelligent man, a likable man,” Bowman says of Willie. “During our dancing he’d never laid one hand on me. He had never done anything suggestive at all.”
The Kennedys join Bowman’s friend Anne Mercer and Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, at their table. The conversation is barely audible above the pulsing music, but at some point, Mercer starts arguing politics with the senator. Ted decides to leave with Patrick, who invites Michele Cassone back to the Kennedy mansion for a drink and a million-dollar view of the Atlantic. She accepts, following Patrick and his father’s white convertible in her own car.
The Kennedy mansion at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard is a Mediterranean-style home designed by architect Addison Mizner in 1923, and has been in the Kennedy family since 1933, when Joe Sr. bought it during the Depression for a steal at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. JFK wrote Profiles in Courage while vacationing there, as well as his inaugural address. The mansion is known as “La Guerida” but has been nicknamed the “Kennedy Winter White House” ever since Jack began using it as a presidential retreat. Despite the home’s fashionable pedigree, however, most first-time visitors in the 1990s are surprised at its shabby-chic décor. “It was dark, dingy, and smelly,” recalls Michele Cassone, cracking, “If it was my house, I’d have it exterminated.”
Ted, Patrick, and Cassone chat in the living room, where Cassone switches from flutes of nightclub bubbly to glasses of white wine. Everyone else in the house is apparently asleep.
“Ted was very drunk, and Patrick and I had a nice buzz on,” she recalls.
The senator disappears from the room. Patrick and Cassone head into a bedroom the cousins are sharing for the weekend and start making out.
Then Ted comes into his son’s room to say good night. But he’s not wearing any pants, only underwear and his long-tailed shirt.
“I got totally weirded out,” Cassone recalls. “I said, ‘I’m outta here.’”
Patrick escorts Michele Cassone to her car and politely says good night.
Farther down the beach, things are unfolding differently.
Left without a ride when his uncle and cousin took off earlier, Willie asks Patricia Bowman for a lift home when Au Bar closes at 3:00 a.m. She’s happy to oblige, and when they arrive, the two of them go for a walk on the sand, despite a brisk breeze.
According to Bowman’s version of what happens next, Willie then asks her if she’d like to go skinny dipping. She declines. But he goes ahead, stripping off his clothes and wading into the cold surf.
Bowman turns to go up to the house and to her car. “I’ve had a nice night with a nice guy,” she later recalls thinking as she left. “It would be nice if he called again, but hey, let’s be realistic, he’s a Kennedy.”
But as she reaches the concrete steps, she claims, she feels a hand grab her bare ankle from behind. She trips and falls. It’s Willie, who she says has suddenly undergone a “surreal” aggressive transformation. She breaks free and starts “running, to get away,” but Willie, who is six-two and around two hundred pounds, tackles her on the lawn by the pool.
“I tried to arch my back to get him off me,” five-six, 130-pound Bowman will later testify, “and he slammed me back into the ground. I was yelling, ‘No!’ and then ‘Stop!’”
But Willie won’t stop. “I was struggling, and he told me to ‘Stop it, Bitch,’” she alleges. “Then he pushed my dress up and he raped me. I thought he was going to kill me.”
Per her police report, Bowman “remembers hearing herself screaming and wondering why no one in the house would come out and help her, especially since she knew that Senator Kennedy was in the house.”
Yet Ted and Patrick will swear in court they never heard any screams—nor did the other dozen or so people staying in the house. Willie’s mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, was sleeping at the Palm Beach estate that night, but says she didn’t hear anyone crying for help, or any other noises. Other houseguests, including William Barry (the former FBI agent who wrested the gun from Sirhan Sirhan after he shot Bobby Kennedy) and two prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office (friends of John Kennedy Jr.’s) also assert it was a peaceful night.