The House of Kennedy(70)
After ten days of testimony, with forty-five witnesses called, the attorneys give their closing arguments. The six jurors head out to deliberate—but are back with a verdict after only seventy-seven minutes, barely an hour.
When the court clerk announces the verdict, Patricia Bowman, watching via television from the prosecutor’s office, faints. “I remember just leaning up against this door frame. And I remember the words, ‘Not guilty.’ And the next thing I remember is…they were helping me off the floor,” she tells Diane Sawyer in an interview on ABC’s Primetime Live.
Willie, meanwhile, is all smiles. Outside the courthouse, hundreds of onlookers have gathered, chanting “Willie! Willie! Willie!” Willie looks visibly relieved, and even his mother, Jean, declares, “I feel great, just great!”
From Boston, Ted Kennedy again highlights the family bond. “If there’s anything good that has come out of this whole long experience, it’s the renewed closeness of our family and friends,” he tells reporters.
“I have an enormous debt to the system and to God, and I have a terrific faith in both of them,” Willie says. “I’m just really, really happy.” Of the jurors, Willie says, “My life was in their hands and I’m so grateful for the job they did.”
Several of the six-member jury later appear on talk shows. One of the most outspoken is Lisa Lea Haller, founder of an eponymous cosmetics company, and the youngest juror at thirty-seven. She tells the New York Times that the lack of physical evidence was most persuasive. “There was nothing on the dress,” she says, asking, “What about all the screaming? Nobody heard it.”
Shortly after his news conference, Willie is whisked back to La Guerida in the family’s 1989 wood-paneled Mercedes station wagon, where his friends and family have already gotten the victory party started. Roy Black claims on several TV shows that at the party, they held a prayer circle and “said a prayer for Patty.”
Despite the verdict, Patricia Bowman releases a statement declaring, “I do not for one moment regret the action I have pursued,” and as her lawyers’ own statement says, “A not-guilty verdict does not equate to innocence.”
She also points out that the media circus of the televised trial—which arguably begins the era of real-life court cases as popular spectacle—was hard for her to take. “To some people, this has been entertainment,” she says. “It was a tragedy. It was a trauma for me.”
Among those who especially profit from the trial is Roy Black, who not only gains a television career and more celebrity clients, but even romance—about nine months after the trial ends, Roy Black runs into juror Lea Haller at a Coral Gables bar. The two begin dating, and marry in 1994. From 2011 to 2013, Haller appears as a main cast member on three seasons of Bravo TV’s reality show The Real Housewives of Miami, where Black occasionally appears with her on camera.
Willie earns his medical degree from Georgetown, but finds himself again in the news in 1993, when he’s arrested on October 23 for assaulting a bouncer in Virginia. He pleads no contest to the charges, and sidesteps the court date that had been scheduled for December 3, in part to avoid what would’ve been “a circus” as well as “to be with his mother in Ireland for the holidays,” as Jean Kennedy Smith had just been named the US ambassador to Ireland a few months earlier.
He founds a Chicago-based humanitarian group but resigns as the head in 2004, after a lawsuit (later dismissed) alleges that three separate employees had come forward with claims of sexual harassment. Willie denies the charges, claiming, “Family and personal history have made me vulnerable to these kinds of untruths.”
Chapter 47
When you look at the third generation of Kennedy men, much of what remains of a once powerful dynasty is good teeth, good hair and the best public relations a trust fund can buy,” Time magazine announces in May 1997.
While the family as a whole remains devoted to public service, whether through government (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is lieutenant governor of Maryland, while her brother Joseph Kennedy II and their cousin Patrick Kennedy are both congressmen in the U.S. House of Representatives, for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, respectively) or philanthropy (founding programs such as the Special Olympics, Citizens Energy, or Physicians Against Land Mines), it’s certainly true that the once-mythologized Kennedy image has taken a few hits over the last decades.
“For those of us who were born after the assassination, I don’t think we have the same perspective or the same investment,” remarks one twenty-something in 1997. “I’m more in touch with the scandals that have been coming out lately than the whole higher mythology.”
A caustic Newsweek cover story entitled “Dynasty in Decline” reminds readers how in the 1960s, JFK and RFK embodied prosperity and social justice; now in the 1990s, “the drama is not so grand…[the younger Kennedys] are emblems of a tabloid time, a fin-de-siècle moment when public life seems less important and stories about sex more titillating.”
The combination of Kennedys and sex is nothing new, of course, but what’s prompting these latest critiques of Joe and Rose’s grandchildren are two salacious stories that land within days of each other. The first involves Bobby and Ethel’s oldest son, Joe Kennedy II, who’s taken a hit in the polls with the publication of his ex-wife Sheila Rauch Kennedy’s book Shattered Faith, about her resistance to Joe’s petition to have their twelve-year marriage annulled so that he can marry his fiancée and staff member, Beth Kelly, in the Catholic Church. It’s the details that truly hurt the forty-four-year-old, six-term congressman—accusations that he was a bully who decried his ex as a “nobody,” his lack of concern over Sheila’s objections, that he was insensitive enough to serve her the annulment papers while on vacation in the Caribbean with his girlfriend, even his characterization of the annulment itself as just “Catholic gobbledygook.”