William Kennedy Smith's criminal trial and the birth of CourtTV

In 1991, JFK’s 30-year-old nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was accused of raping a woman named Patricia Bowman at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach. The ensuing trial coincided with the birth of CourtTV, and its “gavel-to-gavel” television coverage changed the media landscape forever. We’re joined by Dr. Paul Thaler, author of The Watchful Eye: American Justice in the Age of the Television Trial and The Spectacle: Media and the Making of the OJ Simpson Story, to talk about the ethics of cameras in the courtroom, the legacy of the William Kennedy Smith trial, and our current true crime landscape.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey, David, it's Lyra. Hey.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
What's the first thing you think of? When I asked
about William Kennedy Smith in nineteen ninety one, the one.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
Thing that stands out to me was William Kennedy Smith's smile.
He kind of had a wry smile and wink in
his eye. And I was hoping always that he was
not guilty, because after all the tragedy the family had
been through in our country watched and we were so
invested in the Kennedy clan. And I can't remember if

(00:40):
the alleged victim ever revealed herself or not. I don't
think she did, but I remember his uncle coming to testify.
The world was really small back then. I think I
only saw it on the news or listen to the
radio in the car. But when the verdict came through,
he was acquitted and the Kennedys could get back being Kennedy's.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm George Severes, I'm Lyverra Smith, and this is United
States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with
the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect
of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about
the William Kennedy Smith rape trial.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
In nineteen ninety one, JFK's nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was
accused of raping Patricia Bowman at the Kennedy residence in
Palm Beach. The part of the story everyone agrees on
is that the two of them met at a bar
in the area while Kennedy Smith was having drinks with
his uncle Ted Kennedy and his cousin Patrick. They hit
it off, and Patricia Bowman offered Kennedy Smith a ride

(01:49):
home after Ted and Patrick had already left without him.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
So they go from the bar to the Kennedy residence,
and after they arrive, their stories diverge. According to Smith,
the two have two separate consensual sexual encounters, one on
the beach and one on the grass closer to the
Kennedy residence. According to Patricia Bowman, Smith removes his clothes
to go swimming, She gets uncomfortable and decides she wants

(02:14):
to go home. She leaves, and then he chases after
her and attacks her, pinning her down and assaulting her.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
This is all happening as sexual harassment is freshly in
the public's mind due to Anita Hill's testimony about Clarence Thomas,
and the concept of date rape was still relatively new.
The fact that Patricia Bowman drove Smith back to the
Kennedy residence set doubt against her as a reliable witness,

(02:40):
which made jury selection really difficult. Not to mention that
it was a small county, so a lot of people
already had developed opinions about the case.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
So she was a classic imperfect victim. And he was
a Kennedy. So more about William Kennedy Smith. He was
thirty years old at the time. He was a fourth
year med student at Georgetown, and that was all that
most Americans knew about him beyond him being a Kennedy.
He was handsome, he was educated, he came from a
famous family. Meanwhile, Patricia Bowman was an unmarried single mother

(03:11):
who was out drinking until three am. So it's not
hard to imagine people, especially at that time, considering her
willingness to drive him home as signing up to spend
the night together.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Which hits at the core catch twenty two of victim
blaming in these cases. People say she should have expected
to get assaulted by allowing herself to be alone with
him at his house, while at the same time, saying, well,
of course we believe him over her because he's such
an upstanding and trustworthy man. She also thought, this is

(03:43):
not a man I should be afraid to be alone with,
so him assaulting her would be totally shocking and unpredictable.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
The other irony, of course, is that Ted Kennedy is
essentially the star witness, so he was with them at
the bar and then later gives an emotional testimony to
remind the jury that William's father had recently died, and
yet another blow to the great American Kennedy family. Ted
Kennedy basically reframes a night of drinking as a night
of grieving with family, the same Ted Kennedy, who, as

(04:11):
we discussed again last week, left the scene of an
accident that resulted in a young woman's death.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
So that's the disparity between the individuals and the public eye.
The lawyers were also in different leagues of access and privilege.
The Kennedys hired Roy Black, who at the time had
already represented controversial defendants, such as a mother whose toddler
drowned in the sink. The fact that her first child
died the same way was kept from the jury. She

(04:39):
was acquitted. He would go on to represent more cool
people like Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Meanwhile, Patricia Bowman's lawyer was Moira lash So. Lash was
the assistant State Attorney of Palm Beach County. She had
a stellar professional history with a nearly one hundred percent
conviction record, but she didn't play to the press and
even requested the judge be reassign as she believed she
would not be partial, which backfired as the request was denied.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
She had a strong case going into the trial. Lash
had testimony of three other women who said Smith had
also assaulted them, but the judge didn't allow them to
be heard by the jury, claiming it didn't prove a pattern.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
So she did have testimony of three other women and
that was not allowed to be even mentioned in court.
And that was honestly just one of many problems. As
we'll discuss later, there were a few elements of the
trial that were just completely detrimental to Lash's case. A
couple of things that come to mind are, first of all,

(05:38):
the testimony of Anne Mercer, who is Patricia Bowman's friend
who was called as a witness. It turned out her
boyfriend had stolen an earned from the Kennedy estate when
they went to pick up Patricia Bowman and the urn
was placed in front of her as she was answering
the questions as a witness, which just served to remind

(06:02):
everyone watching, both in the courtroom and at home, that
she was, at her core, an unethical person who is dishonest,
and who would do something like watch someone steal and
urn and not do anything.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
The reason why he says he took it was to
prove that they were there right.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Exactly, so Ann Mercer's boyfriend stole the urn to prove
that he was there at the Kennedy estate. Ann Mercer
did not mention it when she was interrogated at another time,
and then she was caught in a lie by the
Kennedy team, which, of course, as we'll mention, later had
five private investigators at their disposal, whereas more Lash was
an assistant state attorney. Another element of the case which

(06:40):
really hurt the Patricia Bowman side was that she was
written about in the press with a certain level of suspicion.
One of the things that happened is that The New
York Times published her name, which actually went against its
own guidelines of covering cases like this, and then that
led to larger fallout. It led to even worse tabloid coverage.

(07:01):
So all of this is to say one of the
reasons why this trial was so impactful was because of
its media coverage and specifically because it all happened on
live TV.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
It set the stage for the OJ Trial to take
over the world's attention. Just a few years later. Court
TV launched one month before the William Kennedy Smith trial
and proved the network could be a runaway success. CNN
also aired Gavel to Gavel coverage for the first time,
and its ratings sword During the ten day trial, nineteen

(07:32):
different members of the Kennedy family were present to support
William Kennedy Smith. The public aid it up and didn't
learn until afterwards that Smith had been accused of sexually
assaulting other women before Bowman.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
William Kennedy Smith was ultimately acquitted, but he would go
on to be accused of sexual assault and harassment by
three more women in Chicago. While running a nonprofit.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
With US Today to discuss the way everything changed once
cameras were added to the courtroom is Paul Faylor.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Paul Faylor has written two books on the subject the
watchful eye, American justice in the age of the television trial,
and the spectacle media in the making of the oj
Simpsons story. Doctor Taylor, thanks for joining us. If you
can describe just what the trial was in the most
basic sense before we get into the media coverage of
it and court TV and all that. Who was the defendant,

(08:23):
who was the accused, and what happened?

Speaker 4 (08:25):
Well, very simply, it was kind of an ordinary tale
where William Kennedy Smith meets this young thirty one year
old med student meets this thirty year old individual, and
they later go back to William Kennedy Smith's estate. He
asks her to go for a swim, she declines, he does,
goes for a swim, comes back. They engage in some

(08:49):
sexual encounter, and this is whether the great debate comes
in whether in fact it was consensual or not, and
subsequently this small, everyday kind of encounter becomes this national event.
So that's really the background. There's not really a lot
of mystery to where both these folks were coming from.

(09:10):
Patricia Bowman certainly has a different type of growing up background,
having to do with kind of a disruptive family life
and the like. So they come from two different economic
and social settings coming to play on that estate there
in Palm Beach, leading to this sensational.

Speaker 5 (09:29):
Trial that kind of broke out in nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
And at that time, what was like the cultural understanding
of date rate as a concept.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Yeah, it was certainly very very viable, and that certainly
comes into play in the trial itself, and it was
interesting in the wake of the verdict of that case,
which essentially is a not guilty verdict against William Kennedy Smith,
there was concern that a rate accusations would go down.

(10:00):
In fact, during that trial, date rape accusations of the
Palm Beach area did decline because victims of date rape
certainly didn't want to be exposed as part of such
a high profile trial where actually the victim, the alleged
victim in that case, is actually on camera, even though
she was blotted out by electronics. People got to know

(10:23):
Patricia Bowman pretty well, not only through the trial, but
also through other media coverage. The New York Times wrote
an expose about her life the background of her life,
So it certainly did have an impact on the social
political climate surrounding date rape during that particular time.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
And as you said, her name was published in the
New York Times, which in fact went against their guidelines
and led to fall out both in the public and
also internally at the Times. There were a few journalists
there and New York Times employees that signed a letter
saying they disagreed with the coverage. But before we get
to the of the sort of media circus around it,
I want to get down like the main characters. So

(11:04):
we have the two people involved in the actual event,
and then can you tell us a little bit about
each of their lawyers?

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Oh well, I know it's funny, haveter now revisit that
piece of this. I believe that William Kennedy Smith had
a very high profile lawyer by the name of Roy Black.
I actually got to know Roy through interviewing over the
years because he was involved in some other high profile
cases and his team essentially was kind of the dream
team of that particular time. I can't really speak to

(11:33):
Patricia Bowman's lawyers. I imagine they were state prosecutors and
they were involved in that case. But certainly William Kennedy
Smith had the name and the resources and his uncle
behind this case. In fact, Edward Kennedy testifies during that
particular trial. So in terms of the social political dynamics,

(11:55):
it certainly was waighing in favor of the defendant in
this particular case.

Speaker 5 (12:00):
That's what I can say about that relationship.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, I mean this is after words. But Roy Black
represented Kelsey Grammer, he represented Joe Francis from Girls Gone Wild,
he represented Jeffrey Epstein, and then way more recently than
the others, he represented Justin Bieber. He's like a name,
you know.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
He was also called the He had earned the nickname
the Professor for his sort of, you know, methodical approach
to building a case and to questioning people. I do
want to say before this trial, one of the things
he was known for in Florida was winning this nineteen
eighty nine acquittal of a police officer who shot and
killed the black motorcyclist. He was known as taking on

(12:41):
these kind of controversial cases, and for this trial, one
of the ways that he really just crushed the other
side is that he hired five private investigators to dig
up information about Bowman. She had a child out of wedlock,
she had gotten abortions, that all these things that just
if you are primed to not leave her really did
not help in the culture that was already going in

(13:03):
sort of suspicious of a story like this.

Speaker 5 (13:05):
Yeah, they certainly publicized those facts.

Speaker 4 (13:08):
I think she had like fourteen traffic violations and they
spoke about her driving record, And you're absolutely right, she
was kind of painted as that woman that you know,
out to get Kennedy. She was certainly the accuser, but
also in certain ways defending herself during this particular trial.
So yeah, the scales of justice wasn't necessarily balanced in

(13:31):
this particular case.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Will be back with more United States at Kennedy after this.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Break, and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, it's kind of wild looking at it today, it
almost seems fictional, Like it almost seems written her position
and his position, and then you know.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
It really is these sort of archetypes of the powerful
man that has all the resources on his side, the
imperfect victim that people are primed not to believe because
she's perfect in every way and she has God forbid
made mistakes in the past. I mean it is almost
like a morality tale or something.

Speaker 4 (14:17):
Yeah, it's interesting because emblazoned in our mind is this
kind of story, narrative and One of the reasons it
is so prominent and that we are speaking about it
today is really because it was televised, and even though
it was a high profile case for the most part,
it would have been certainly less prominent in our historic

(14:38):
mind collective if, in fact, we hadn't seen that ten
day trial, hour upon hour on television. And it was
also kind of and perhaps we'll talk about as a
historic time for television because C and N is just
pretty much born in nineteen ninety one. It's just very
very new, and there's a new network that I'm sure

(14:59):
we'll talk talk about as well, called court TV. That
narrative is very very prominent in our minds because those
images are in our mind. I think it visualized that
courtroom as it played out.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, it's interesting because actually one of my first memories
of television is the Bronco Chase from OJ and in
my head, that's the most famous televised court case. That's
what created this industry. But that's not really the truth.
This predated that, and this had a wide audience. Can

(15:33):
you explain a bit about putting cameras in the courtroom.

Speaker 4 (15:36):
And back in the day, this was a high profile
controversy whether or not to allow the courtroom, which was
once kind of a sanctuary in terms of justice. The
last thing judges wanted is to have the avalanche of
public opinion flow into a high profile case, or any
case for that matter. And once cameras came in, those

(15:58):
floodgates opened and we had all this publicity leading to
a new genre which I kind of named the television trial,
and it became its own thing, its own genre, with
its own network and it's own cast of characters and
the idea that you remember the Broncochase. Well, that led
to an eleven month trial that certainly captivated maybe the world,

(16:23):
but certainly in America, captivated all networks, all eyes, all discussion.
You could not escape the year of Simpson. So no
wonder it plays in your mind though.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
So especially cored TV. This trial really coincided with the
birth of Court TV. And it's funny because you hear
court TV and you imagine the sort of craven, trashy
organization that is trying to quote unquote exploit people at
their most vulnerable or people at these very significant moments,
and trying to make entertainment out of something that should

(16:56):
be a very serious legal event. You know, we watched
the Court TV special that summarized this case, and something
that really struck me was that compared to how things
are now, it actually seems very respectable. Compared to what
I now think of as the trashy parts of the
entertainment industry, it seems like pretty buttoned up. So I'm

(17:18):
wondering if you can tell us a little bit about
just where Court TV came from, who was behind it,
and how it captured the moment.

Speaker 4 (17:27):
Well, I can't speak very directly to it because I
would get into memorable debates with Steve Brill, who was
the founder of Court TV. So I got to know
Steve quite well. We were pretty much on opposite sides
of the camera debate. So there's a lawyer. In fact,
he was also the editor of a publication called American Lawyer,
so he was in the media print.

Speaker 5 (17:49):
Business, and he has this idea.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
In fact, he tells the story that he's in the
car and he comes up with this idea that maybe
we should televise trials, and that leads to this kind
of new network on cable Core TV, and they were
kind of scrambling, you know, me trying to figure out
what are we going to do with court television because

(18:12):
for the most part, trials are boring. You know, trials
aren't entertaining. If you've ever sat through a trial, you
realize how ted is it could become. So you know,
I would go down to court TV here in New York.
I know he sold that business. Subsequently, it's no longer
in his hands. But in the beginning it was really
this newborn television child and the William Kennedy Smith trial.

Speaker 5 (18:37):
Court TV was the pool camera.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
For all the networks in that particular trial, and actually
Steve was a very high profile character. He actually wanted
to charge CNN and other outlets to take his pool
footage from that case. They kind of reached an agreement
that he was only there representing the press at large.

Speaker 5 (19:00):
But that's kind of a side note to core.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
TV and what does that mean?

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Does that mean they had the singular the camera.

Speaker 5 (19:07):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 4 (19:08):
Their camera, the core TV camera in but the agreement
is is that other networks would be allowed.

Speaker 5 (19:15):
To use that pool footage.

Speaker 4 (19:17):
We couldn't have every camera in that courtroom, so we
had that single camera. That's typically how it goes in
these television trials. I got a behind the scenes look
at how Core TV worked and it's really no surprise.
I asked Steve, you know what trials are you selecting
even to televise?

Speaker 5 (19:35):
And basically his choices was really based on the entertainment
medium of television.

Speaker 4 (19:40):
Whether this was a high profile case with characters that
could sell well on television, that we could identify with
the storylines could be captivating to us, date rape, for instance,
murder of two people out in Brentwood, California, you know.
And so the values here we see the merging and

(20:01):
I don't want to get too academic here, but we
see the merging of entertainment values with legal values, and
often they certainly didn't coincide.

Speaker 5 (20:11):
We appreciate the relative quiet judicial.

Speaker 4 (20:15):
Notions that go into a trial, you know, the very
idea that we're supposed to hold off a verdict in
a trial until the very end, until both sides present
their case. And we know, when it comes to these
high profile cases, verdicts by the public at least are
reached much much sooner by their connection to the trial itself.
In fact, you're pushed into sides, which person do you believe?

(20:39):
And it becomes a media event itself, what I call
the thirteenth Dura the public jury.

Speaker 5 (20:45):
Just as to.

Speaker 4 (20:45):
Recall whether this jury members in William Kennedy Smith was
sequestered or not. I know in the OJ case they
were sequestered, but they reached a verdict within hours, within
three hours, and they had a forty five minute lunch break.

Speaker 5 (20:57):
So they took about eleven month trial.

Speaker 4 (21:01):
And even though Judge Edo had instructed them to certainly
review the evidence, testimony and the like, they came to
a virtually immediate verdict in that case that the verdict
itself captured the attention of the public. I was actually
in a large university space to see the verdict of

(21:22):
OJ Simpson. Bill Clinton stopped what he was doing to
go to his secretary's office to watch this on television.
My mom was on a hospital gurney. She was waiting
for some check up, nothing terribly serious, but she was
left there by the nurses. So the medical staff held
goes see the verdict of OJ Simpson. You know that

(21:44):
trial wasn't pulling in the American audience. And if you
were around during that time, you knew what that moment
was that everyone could tell you where they were at
the time of a Simpson verdict, And clearly it was
a shock to the system and divisith because it did
break down often by racial lines. The double murder trial
became a story about race of America. So that's a

(22:07):
whole other, large story that perhaps were deviating from.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
But I think your point to this idea that the
specifics of a trial sort of get muddied when it
becomes a metaphor for larger issues, and everyone kind of
can project their own biases and their own beliefs onto it.
And for this one, you know, for oj it might
have been about marriage or race or whatever else people
were projecting onto it, And for this one, it was
clearly about the relationship between men and women, and of

(22:34):
course the idea of privilege and specifically the Kennedy family
and this idea that they can kind of get away
with anything because of machine that's behind them. I do
want to say the jury was se question it. I
just looked it up. But what I wanted to ask
was about how the theatrics that already exist in a courtroom.
I mean, obviously lawyers are grandstanding. They are trying to

(22:58):
convince a group of people of their side, how those
theatrics are kind of amplified and distorted by this kind
of media environment. And I'm wondering if we could talk
a little bit about some of the moments in this
trial that became larger stories. So I'm thinking about the
interrogation of Anne Mercer, who is Patricia Bowman's friend who
she called after she was allegedly raped to come pick

(23:21):
her up. I want to talk a little bit about
the famous urn that was placed right in front of her.
So if you can talk about which parts of the
trial basically became front page news because it was being
livestream to everyone.

Speaker 4 (23:34):
Yeah, it's interesting you're bringing that up. I should probably
go back and take a look at some of that
footage that went on during that particular time. My memory
of the trial and it did not go back to
review the trial itself and its specifics, but the larger
themes certainly are part of my intellectual memory having to
do with that particular case. But there would be moments,

(23:56):
and there are moments in every trial that become the
event of the day on television. You know, it could
be the day of the urn or the day of
Anne Mercer. They become front and center on all news coverage.
You know, there was a case here in New York,
the Joel Steinberg trial, in which this lawyer is accused

(24:17):
of killing a six year old daughter.

Speaker 5 (24:18):
It's a horrific case.

Speaker 4 (24:20):
And actually one of the first cases in New York
to allow cameras in the court. And it was also
a national and international event. There were folks in Australia.
I saw the Steinberg case and that might not be
familiar to but it was a big deal in nineteen
eighty nine, and it's kind of even predated William Kennedy
Smith as well as Simpson, and I was actually I

(24:42):
would actually attend the trial. And there was one moment
in that trial where a doctor on the stand demonstrated
the type of blow to the head necessary to kill
this six year old child.

Speaker 5 (24:56):
A terrible moment.

Speaker 4 (24:57):
So what this doctor did was literally lamb his hand
and it was dramatic. Well, that testimony went on for
six seven hours that day, and I went home to
watch the coverage. Every network, CNN, other networks that covered
that trial on and on and on. They covered that
one five second moment over and over and over again.

(25:21):
And if you were just a citizen trying to understand
that case. That moment defined it for you. You may
not have seen the other seven hours that day, you
wouldn't have had a contextual moment. We're using a very
dramatic example, of course, but what we see on television
is not what we see in the courtroom. The courtroom
often plays out much more slowly, as we know, And

(25:44):
so you're talking about two particular instances a standout. I
would venture to say if I went back to take
a look at those instances, it would play out time
in and time out on the coverage of that case.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
We're going to take a short break, stay with us,
and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Are there other big moments or any important questions or
answers or anything that became magnified in shaped the public's opinion.

Speaker 4 (26:25):
I think it's almost an arguable, frankly, that the biggest
moment in that case was when William Kennedy Smith goes
onderstand and I'm looking at it right now, the transcript
of his description of the alleged incident, and it is pretty.

Speaker 5 (26:41):
Graphic, if that's the word.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Even Rory talks about taking her panties off, having to
do with the sexual act itself, very explicit, and I
could actually see his image in my mind's eye testifying
during that particular time. So if you were going to
ask me about one highlighted moment, it would be that,

(27:03):
and I would probably on the other side of it
speak about Patricia Bowman's testimony as well. Hers is actually
a little more obscure, frankly because she was digitally blotted
out by the electronics there, so her facial image certainly
doesn't come to mind. But certainly that moment in the

(27:23):
case just galvanized all media coverage at that time.

Speaker 5 (27:28):
So that would be my memory of that case.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
And it was a surprise that he took the stand.

Speaker 4 (27:34):
Is that well, you know, it's always dangerous, you know,
for defendant to expose himself to all sorts of questioning,
certainly by the prosecutor in that case. And then it
became according to pundits, he said, she said type of case,
who do you believe?

Speaker 5 (27:53):
And we know what the result of that was.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
It's an interesting media question, a mass media question. What
effect does the obscuring off someone's face have on the
people watching her, Because it is this double edged sword
round the one hand of course, you don't want your
face exposed to everyone when you're going through this incredibly
vulnerable thing. But on the other hand, of course it's

(28:15):
going to hopefully increase empathy if you are looking at
someone crying and describing the worst night of their lives.
And I think I would imagine that it really didn't
help that people couldn't see her face. Unlike William Kennedy Smith, who,
in fact, through a combination of I'm sure media training
and sort of natural Kennedy charisma, actually comes across pretty

(28:37):
well and he's very calm. He really seems like a
nice kid caught in a bad situation or something like.
It's interesting, even if you're primed not to believe him,
he actually gives a very good performance in terms of
Patricia Bowman's identity to zoom out of it, because of course,
the media environment isn't just court, t VNCNN, it's also
the newspapers, it's also tabloids. There's an entire system them.

(29:00):
Can you talk a little bit about how her identity
was unveiled and then what the fallout of that was.

Speaker 4 (29:08):
Well, first of all, getting back to your point about
Patricia Bowman, understand I'm actually thinking whether the electronic distortion
of her understand helped or hurt her. In terms of
the public eye, we don't see her, We don't see
her facial expressions. We do see William Kennedy Smith's face,
and I would agree with you. I think it comes

(29:29):
off as the good kid, you know, caught up in
a bad situation, right, And it's.

Speaker 5 (29:35):
Really kind of a double a sort.

Speaker 4 (29:37):
On one hand, do you want other people who have
been exposed to this criminality to shy away from reporting
this because they're going to be part of the public
eye in some sort of way. On the other side,
by distorting her features, do you send another message to
an audience that this is something maybe to be shameful about,
that this is something that you know, why aren't we

(29:58):
seeing this? Don't we have the right to say, who's
accusing us of a crime. That's on a different level altogether,
I suppose, But it does create a secondary messages which
are interesting to me someone who studies media and the like.
Whether we benefit or not by having trials on television,
I'm still very skeptical of it, frankly, but in this

(30:19):
particular case, what is the imagery that's coming across from
the party's concerned.

Speaker 5 (30:25):
By the way, if Kennedy Smith didn't look.

Speaker 4 (30:27):
So boyish, if he really looked like he was guilty,
is that how we're going to make judgments as to
his legal guilt or innocence in this case. So it's
an image based medium that makes us make decisions that
have less to do sometimes with the law, than to
do with our own perceptions of the case. So I'm

(30:49):
not sure I answered your question.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
The second question was just about Patricia Bowman's identity, because
it was eventually revealed. In fact, sure was it revealed
by the New York Times or it was something like
the New York Times are was written without her name,
and then it was somehow the editor put it in.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
The reporter had not put her name in, and then
the editor put it in without telling them and published it.

Speaker 5 (31:11):
So that's the backstory in the Times.

Speaker 4 (31:12):
It's interesting because, of course the editor who made that
decision was accused of having ties to the Kennedy family,
or whether the Kennedy family influenced the New York Times.
And then it becomes another question about the political influence
having to do with these trials. So everything comes into
question as a result of this trial, and as you

(31:35):
correctly point out, what happens when you put a camera
into the courtroom, it feeds all media. It's not just
television media. All media feel obligated to kind of get
attached to a particular trial. If I could tell you
just a brief anecdote, which sometimes shows the absurdity of
this point. I covered the OJ Simpson case and there

(31:56):
was an editor from dog World that was covering the case.
She was at the trial and I interviewed her briefly.
I said, why are you covering the OJ Simpson case?
And she said, well, you know, there was a dog,
a Nikita, that found the two bodies at the scene

(32:17):
at the Brentwood house, Ryan Goldman and Simpson's ex wife
and Decle. And she felt her readers wanted to know
about this particular case. And that is one of the
strange examples of this. But all media in fact, to
be out of the Simpson story, and I'm sorry, I
keep going back and forth on this means you're almost

(32:39):
out of the culture itself. So other mediums of communication
kind of come in and gravitate. Pages upon pages were
devoted in the Los Angeles Times to the Simpson case.

Speaker 5 (32:52):
Regularly.

Speaker 4 (32:53):
The La Times became the Simpson Beat, the paper itself,
and so did, of course, television network show and cable
shows as well. It shows the power of these high
profile cases. Today we're talking about the Menandez case. Most
folks weren't born I imagine, who are talking about the
no in this case. Maybe I'm exaggerating only a little

(33:14):
bit there. It is interesting the afterlife of these cases
in terms of I made for TV movies and celebrity.
Again one quick example, there was a case here in
Long Island, New York, involving a young woman by the
name of Amy Fisher. I don't know if you that

(33:34):
name rings a bell, but she was deemed the Long
Island Lolita, that was her nickname, and she had an
affair with an older man by the name of Joey Buttafoco.
Who could forget Joey Buttafuco right In any case, This
was one of the early days of television trials here
in New York, and they actually just filmed parts of

(33:55):
their pre trial hearing. They didn't follow the entire case,
but in the course of one week there were three
made for TV movies about Amy Fisher, one from Amy
Fisher's point of view, one from Joey Buttafoco's point of view,
and then there was a third that was kind of generic.

(34:15):
I suppose in one week they had three made for
television trials, which I find quite astunding if you asked me.
In the case of oj Simpson, there were all sorts
of offshoots having to do with that case as well.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
You're reminded me of, like speaking of the Menandez Brothers case,
something that I think became more popular knowledge, or at
least within my generation. I would say when this was
like revisited recently, was that the facts of their abuse
were not allowed to be admitted in quarter or I'm
sorry if I'm like saying that the wrong way, but

(34:50):
I think it's greated. You know, previously had explained that
they had been abused by their father their whole life,
and then when this trial went, they weren't allowed to
say that, which is really strange. But it reminds me
of this case also in that they knew that William
Kennedy Smith had been accused multiple times I think it
was three different women had accused him of a similar

(35:11):
sexual assault, and that was not allowed to be admitted
into court, which is I don't know. These things I
think are confusing to an outsider, at least I find
them confusing when like facts are not allowed to be included.
But it's part of the whole making sure that the
jurors are going to be not biased or.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
I mean, I don't know if you can speak to that,
because it's just something I find.

Speaker 5 (35:34):
I think you're making a great point.

Speaker 4 (35:37):
Basically, in any high profile television trial, there are essentially
two juries. There's a jury inside the core room and
they have vetted, you know, to see that they're unbiased.
We know that process of warder and the like right,
and then there's a public jury, and the public jury
is actually exposed to all sorts of information that is

(35:58):
not allowed in the case. The judge makes decision what
is admissible in a courtroom. We know that, and often
our decisions on a case are certainly influenced by all
of the evidence and testimony that comes out beyond the
parameters of that courtroom. And it doesn't surprise me that
sometimes we come to two different verdicts, a public verdict

(36:22):
and then there's the courtroom verdict that exists because we're
working from two different perceptions of the case, and we
have every right to ask the question, I suppose why
wasn't this allowed at all? That but there are reasons,
legal reasons why certain testimony is not allowed because it
may be highly influential, but the judge thinks it's not
relevant to the particular case, whatever that is. We feel

(36:45):
sometimes we know more than the jury members do, and
in a sense we do. But again, from a legal
point of view, do we want to have trials by
public jury or do we want to have trials that
are contained within the courtroom itself and follow the rules
of the court rather than the rules of journalism, which
wants to tell a much bigger story, If that makes

(37:05):
any sense too.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, And I think what complicates it further is this
idea that when you can see everything happening in the courtroom,
you do have the full picture. And I think this
is kind of the main argument, correct me if I'm
wrong that a lot of people that are pro cameras
in the courtroom make is that it is good for
average citizens to see how justice is deliberated. But there's
another layer of obfuscation because you, in fact don't have

(37:30):
all the information. You just know what's going on in
the courtroom. You don't know, or you might not know
if you haven't read very closely. For example, that three
other women had accused this man of sexual assault and
that just was not allowed in the court. You think, Wow,
I know everything, I can make a decision, But in
fact you are in a strange ray, almost more ignorant
than you would be if you were to just wait
for the long newspaper article that explained everything in context.

Speaker 5 (37:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
I mentioned the Steinberg case before, and here was a
man who was convicted of manslaughter in the case of
a six year old daughter, and I interviewed him for
about thirteen hours up at Danamoor Prison at the time
I was writing this book. I sat in this little
room with him and it was a very intensive conversation.
I tried to go through the case with him and

(38:15):
talking about cameras in the court and at one time Steinberg,
who was really very intense individual. But he does turn
to me and says, how would you like to be
a defendant in a television trial? A very simple question, right,
And I thought about that and I said I probably
would not want to be because for the very reasons
what we're speaking about right, do we want every facet

(38:37):
of our life in a high profile case to be
kind of examined and judged And while we may feel
we know more than the jury and they really perhaps
came to a wrong decision, what is the trade off? Right,
do we really want these cases that are you know,
have enormous social political impacts sometimes to be judged by
eleven people or twelve twelve jury members in a case,

(38:58):
or do we want our founding father said trials should
be public. But what they meant by that is is
not the fact that they weren't around for cameras in
the court. They are much more contained courtroom. I mean,
we're allowed to go into a courtroom, right, we have
access into the space itself. The question is do we
expand that space to make that a national or international

(39:20):
space in which we all can make our own personal judgments.
And by the way, sometimes it has real ramifications. It's
really serious. The LA cops accused of beating Rodney King, right,
they were quitted in that case, and that led to
LA riots. So there really are social political consequences.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
We're going to take a short break, stay with us,
and we're back with the United States. And Kennedy. So
the question of the relationship between reality and media representation

(40:00):
of reality is a very big one in the history
of the Kennedy family. I just want to bring it
back to you know, this is technically a podcast about
the Kennedys, and so I did have the question of
how was the Kennedy name affecting how all of this
was processed. Obviously, the jury selection was very challenging because
they had to try to weed out people that had

(40:21):
specific positive or negative feelings about the Kennedys. The trial
was covered with the lens of this is a promising
young man from America's you know, royal family. So how
do you remember the kind of Kennedy specific coverage?

Speaker 5 (40:36):
Can I gave you a quote by one of my sources.
She was a French journalist, and here it is. I
wrote it down.

Speaker 4 (40:41):
Actually I am here because of the Kennedy name. Willie
Smith is a nobody. So I think that really does
encapsulate this, I mean, to no one's surprise, right, and
your own political views come in too, whether this was
fair or not, certainly the imagery coming out of that court,

(41:03):
your own political sensibilities come into play. It's a very
complicated question having to do with cameras in court.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Frankly, right as George was saying, when you see William
Kennedy Smith giving testimony and he's so poised, he's so calm,
there's media training. The Kennedy's get media training. It wasn't
just him, I mean Ted Kennedy is there. When you
look at who's telling this story in the court, you
have Patricia Bowman and Ann Mercer, who are two women

(41:35):
who probably don't have any media experience or any public
speaking experience even possibly, and then you have Senator Ted
Kennedy representing the context of what happened that night, and
he's painting this story that William Kennedy's father had passed away. Anyways,
one side has a lot of public speaking experience, expertise training,

(41:56):
the other side doesn't. And a lot of what we
read about the trial is that it was lost by
her lawyer not properly being able to question William Kennedy Smith,
and also that Roy Black is a very famous, accomplished
lawyer being able to break down both of the women

(42:18):
and both of the women's stories of the night.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
And it feels so it feels unfair to you.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
Yeah, not that it's impossible that he's telling the truth,
but it just seems like he has a lot more
going for him from the second he walks in there.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
You know, I think you're speaking to the truth of
our American trial system. You know, there are defendants who
cannot afford attorneys, and there are defendants who can afford attorneys.
Right in the oj case, he had seven lawyers, right,
all high profile lawyers, and they were going up basically
against state prosecutors in that case who are highly capable.

(43:00):
But could they match the power of not only his
legal staff, but his name, his reputation, his money that
he could spend on that case. And it's perhaps a
weakness of our legal system. It's interesting in that case
where actually Patricia Boma was introduced to Edward Kennedy at
the bar in Palm Beach before they went over to

(43:21):
the estate, so she'd actually even met the Senator at
one point in time during that period. And he did
have the best defense attorneys in that particular case, and
no doubt he was prepared to go on the stand
to testify and for asking the question does the legal

(43:42):
process work? I could certainly understand the questions surrounding this
particular case. And actually maybe this is the positive having
to do with the television trial. It makes us question
the legal system and asks us questions to resolve somehow,
And so maybe the positive that comes along with these
television trials in terms of the nation.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
We're talking about the media representation and the theatrics, and
there are moments from the oj trial that are part
of the American you know, like if the glove does
not fit, you must acquit. Like that's a phrase that
is a part of our communal understanding of.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
What happened in the court.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
And so there's that side of it where it would
be a very powerful to have access to those kinds
of lawyers, something that I've always been curious about or
confused about. Within that context, So Roy Black, some of
those people that we talked about, like you know, Joe Francis,
Jeffrey Epstein. This is post this trial, but before this
trial he had also he'd represented the cop who in

(44:45):
that shooting ended up leading to the Miami riots. Also
he had represented a woman who was found not guilty
of killing her three year old. Her other child had
died in the same way, drowning in the sink he
was already kind of known as taking on these kinds
of cases. Is it not a bit of an admission
to choose a person who had previously represented these people?

Speaker 4 (45:10):
You kind of get into the essential question of the
American court room. Is it designed for justice or not?
We understand that the scales of justice aren't always balanced.
Most times, frankly, they're balanced against the defendant. If you
look at the vast majority of cases, those defendants can't
afford the royal blocks of the world.

Speaker 5 (45:29):
Right.

Speaker 4 (45:30):
But we do pay attention when what we believe is
an injustice where someone gets off, so to speak, is
guilty because we've come to that decision because they have
a high powered attorney who does his job. Do we
want lawyers to defend people who seem, on the very
facts guilty?

Speaker 5 (45:48):
Do we want defense attorneys? Right?

Speaker 4 (45:50):
I mean that leads to a whole other set of
questions having to do with the type of court system
that we have. Are we innocent until proven guilty? That
the axiom right?

Speaker 1 (46:00):
And in the most generous reading of the value of
cameras in the courtroom, you could say, well, it puts
out there in the open the various power imbalances and
injustices that shape our justice system for the public to see,
and then it's a sign of a healthy society that
then they might react by protesting, or they might react
by attempting to change the way things are done. Of course,

(46:21):
I don't think it always works out that simply, and
that's a very sort of optimistic and liberal in the
traditional sense way of viewing things. But along those lines,
I do want to ask a little bit about just
the legacy of the trial, because we've talked a lot
about the legacy of the oj trial. Obviously, there are
other cases, like Rodney King or Jeffrey Dahmer that were
just such, you know, huge media events that have stuck

(46:42):
with us. This one is kind of interesting because, on
the one hand, it was so important in its time,
and as you argue, it ushered in this new era
of you know, to use an overused term, true crime obsession.
But on the other hand, it's not one that people
reference as much when talking about the important public trials
of the nineties and two thousand. So I'm wondering what

(47:04):
do you think it's legacy was in terms of conceptions
of date rape, in terms of women victims survivors being believed.
Where did it get us?

Speaker 4 (47:14):
It's a great question, Georgie. I wish I had a
clear answer for you. I'm not sure how far any
of these cases actually take us in understanding. Is there
a resonance from the OJAC case, which is much more
high profile, lasted much much longer. I do wonder if
one trial kind of replaces the next, and we get
to that social issue, and then we move on to

(47:35):
the next, and the next and the next. This was
a ten day trial, I believe it was that had
a sensational immediate impact. You know, when Patricia Bowman actually
goes on the air when she testifies over two days,
CNN gets an average of three and a half million
viewers during that time, which is nine times the number

(47:56):
of viewers that would have watched CNN during that time.
But I wonder if it's kind of like a good
meal that you forget the next day in a way,
if that's even a proper analogy, the idea, it's it's
here and then it's we're onto the next meal, so
to speak, television culinary idea, you know. And I wish
I could say these trials really have real significant impact.

(48:18):
But I just wonder, in this melding between entertainment and
the law, what is the residue of that? Do we
actually do learn from these trials or are they entertainment
that is replaced by the next entertainment, the next trial,
the next to where it becomes a genre, the television
trial cour TV. You just plug into court TV. You

(48:40):
could see all of these old trials and movies that
we could watch now from another time. But it's a
good question you asked, what is the cultural resonance?

Speaker 5 (48:49):
Does it really have impact? I'm not quite sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
Something that strikes me is that with all these other trials,
I can imagine other images, like either fictionalizations of them
or you know, it was Saturday Night Live sketch about
OJ a TV movie about Anita Hill. You know, I
think this is a strange exception because I really can't
picture in my head the definitive newspaper cover, the definitive dramatization.

(49:15):
Somehow it was never picked back up again after it
was over.

Speaker 5 (49:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (49:20):
Yeah, maybe William Kennedy Smith did not have the same
residents as John Kennedy or Robert F.

Speaker 5 (49:26):
Kennedy, so maybe he was just hate to use it.

Speaker 4 (49:29):
This way, but a secondary Kennedy figure that didn't have
the gravitational pull over time. I speculate with you why
that's the case, but in talking about it with you,
it certainly becomes vivid in my mind.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
Well, I think they knew that because they showed up.
JFK Junior came. It was notable at the time, the
Kennedy families showing up to support Oh, there's.

Speaker 5 (49:53):
No question about that.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
The clan kind of came together to support William Kennedy Smith.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
They were showing up in rented Sedan's and not you know,
fancy cars. There was no coverage of them going out
to fancy restaurants in the area. You know, they were
also operating as side characters in a media narrative, which
is something that they have decades of experience doing, whereas
of course everyone involved on the other side, so to speak,

(50:22):
was new to the whole media game. So, I mean,
something that was a huge part of the Ann Mercer
fallout is that she accepted money to give an interview
for some you know, video tabloid. And it's like, if
she had been properly trained to be a perfect witness,
she would have never done that because of course, it's
going to come back to bite her. Nowadays, everyone is
so used to the ins and outs of how media works,

(50:42):
because everyone is aware of how they're coming across online
or wherever they're projecting versions of themselves. And at that point,
it was just so new that you had no idea
what the rules were and what incredibly bad luck to
be going up against. The Kennedy's the one family who
does know how all of this works.

Speaker 4 (50:59):
You speaking to the bifurcation of the courtroom and the public.
The Kennedys, of course, are very super aware of public
opinion surrounding this case, so they're going to do whatever
they can to kind of manufacture whatever image. They're going
to come in rented cards and not going to come
in limousines to that case. They understand it perfectly. They've

(51:21):
been broiled in that media life forever, right, and they're
very savvy to do that, frankly, in terms of projecting
that kind of image that they're trying to project. And
there's no question that Patricia Bowman was going up against
that power because they had the power also to control
the press. The press in that regard was on their side.
The Kennedies were very savvy in the way in which

(51:42):
they dealt with the media. We still think of the
Kennedys in such fashion, all right. For the most part,
it is the age of Camelot, you know. It's that
public image that Jackie Kennedy wanted to create around this family,
and so this case really kind of violated that image
in our mind, and the Kennedys were going to whatever
they could to restore public opinion over to their side.

(52:03):
So it's certainly an interesting story to revisit, at least
to see what happened then and draw any conclusions.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
Absolutely, I want to just read just one small thing,
because this is relevant to what we're talking about. I
want to read a quote from William Kennedy Smith's statement
after he was found not guilty outside the courtroom. He says,
I have an enormous debt to the system and to God.
I have terrific faith in both of them, and I'm
just really really happy. And to me, that is like
the quintessential Kennedy quote. I have an enormous debt to

(52:33):
the system and to God. It's almost too perfect. It's
like out of a TV movie. So I just wanted
to end on that.

Speaker 4 (52:39):
Well, we do find even in events that are happening today,
this tie in between politics and the lord, right, So
it doesn't necessarily surprise me that this confluence between these
two systems that's, for lack of a better term, coming
to play in a statement like that. So again, he's
very savvy to kind of draw in the public in

(53:03):
terms of that sentiment.

Speaker 5 (53:04):
So yeah, well, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
This was really great and I think we both learned
a lot.

Speaker 4 (53:09):
Well, I really appreciate this discussion. It kind of opens
up what was once old territory, and we visited that
look at some of the things that I wrote about
in fact, and it's wonderful actually to see that this
issue still is resonating. You know, that case study obviously
done many years ago, but I think it's still relevant
today having to do with this kind of collision between

(53:32):
the medium and the message. And I think in revisiting
the Kennedy case, it gives us some lessons even for
today having to do with television trials.

Speaker 5 (53:41):
So thank you, thank you for all of that.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
So that's it for this week's episode. United States of
Kennedy is hosted by me Lyra Smith and George Severes.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
Research by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson. Our executive producer
is Jenna Cagel. Original music by Josh Wittapolski, edited by
Graham Gibson, and mixed by Doug Bain. Next week, we're
digging into Bobby Kennedy and his pursuit of organized crime
and Jimmy Hoffa.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
So subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all
things Kennedy every week