The House of Kennedy Read online

  Willie carefully unfolds his version of events. He turns the tables and accuses Bowman of having picked him up at Au Bar, of being the aggressor in consensual sex, claiming she was the one who unzipped his pants, and who “massaged” him to climax before he went into the water for a swim, after which they again had sex.

  Then, he says, he accidentally calls her by the wrong name, at which “she got very, very upset, told me to get the hell off her.”

  Willie says he walks her to her car and she drives away, yet when Willie meets up with his cousin Patrick back in the house, Bowman is inexplicably there.

  By this time, he says, Anne Mercer has also arrived, and Bowman then leaves with her pal.

  Moira Lasch attacks Willie’s testimony, but the three-hour cross barely fazes him. At one point, in response to the prosecution’s sarcastic questioning, Willie says, “Miss Lasch, I’ve searched myself every night since March 29 to try to find out why [she] would make an allegation against me that’s not true, that’s going to destroy my family, destroy my career, possibly send me to jail for fifteen years. I don’t know why she would do that. I don’t understand why anyone would do that.” When questioned why Bowman would have made up her accusations, Willie offers several possibilities, then quickly adds, “But that’s not the issue here. The issue here is I’m innocent. And how do you defend yourself from somebody who says the word ‘rape’ over and over again…I’d like you to tell me how to deal with it?”

  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.”

  Joe’s been openly planning a run for Massachusetts governor, and allegations of his callous behavior causes backlash among his mostly Irish Catholic constituents, though at first it seems there’s every chance the ground he’s losing can be recovered over the year and a half between the book’s publication and the election.

  But less than two days after Sheila appears on Primetime Live to launch her book tour, an even bigger Kennedy scandal overwhelms the annulment pushback. On April 25, 1997, the Boston Globe breaks the shocking story about an alleged affair between Joe’s younger brother Michael Kennedy, a thirty-nine-year-old married father of three, and Marisa Verrochi, his family’s nineteen-year-old former live-in babysitter. Even more disturbing—and potentia
lly constituting statutory rape—are accusations that the affair began as far back as five years earlier, putting the babysitter at a mere fourteen years old.

  “I’m told Ethel is devastated over this,” biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, author of The Other Mrs. Kennedy, says, adding that in his estimation, this was the “seamiest” Kennedy scandal yet. “Michael was the apple of her eye. He was among the Kennedys who were seen as the future of the clan.”

  Indeed, Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, the middle child in Bobby and Ethel’s brood of eleven, is the one Bobby Jr. calls “Mummy’s favorite.” Not that the other siblings resent that title, he says. “No one was jealous of her love for him because he was everyone else’s favorite, too.” Both Teddy and Ethel notice a certain similarity to his father in Michael. “Ethel always felt that he was a lot like Bobby. Very bright, quick,” a family friend notes, while Teddy recalls once glancing at Michael in profile and feeling overcome: “The resemblance was so striking, I had to just sit there and stare at him for a moment,” he says.

  In 1981, Michael marries Victoria Gifford, daughter of football great Frank Gifford, and they have three children: a son, Michael Jr. in January 1983, and two daughters, Kyle Francis in July 1984 and Rory Gifford in November 1987. Like many Kennedys, Michael goes to Harvard, and, like his father and uncle Ted, the University of Virginia Law School. After graduating in 1984, he goes to work with his brother Joe at Citizens Energy, a company Joe started to help low-income families with heating oil. When Joe wins his first term in Congress—taking over from Tip O’Neill the seat his uncle Jack had held from 1947 to 1953—Michael becomes president and CEO at Citizens Energy.

  Among the notoriously competitive siblings, Michael and Joe are said to be the most competitive with each other. “They resent each other because neither one gets what the other does,” says one family friend. “Michael didn’t get to run for Congress; Joe did. Joe, on the other hand, resents Michael because Michael made money, while Joe never did.”

  But a race to see who can tarnish the Kennedy name faster is not a competition either brother wishes to win.

  Chapter 48

  On January 22, 1995, Michael’s wife, Vicki, woke up to find her husband missing from their bed. Perplexed, she begins looking for him throughout their million-dollar home in Cohasset, a seaside suburb of Boston. She can’t find him anywhere.

  Surely he’s not in Marisa’s room?

  The soon-to-be-seventeen-year-old is the daughter of Michael’s close friend, neighbor, and Democratic donor, billionaire entrepreneur Paul Verrochi. It’s well known that even before Marisa moved in, “Michael Kennedy would call her parents and say they were going to be out late and that [Marisa] should sleep over,” neighbor Dan Collins tells Time magazine.

  She’s been living with the Kennedys since last spring, at Michael’s suggestion, and has been babysitting for them since she was in middle school. She’s even traveled with Michael and the kids on a few family vacations—whitewater rafting, skiing, etc.—trips that his wife hadn’t joined in on. With Vicki absent, people have been starting to notice an uncomfortable intimacy between Michael and the teenager.

  Vicki opens the door.

  Michael is there, in Marisa’s bed.

  Vicki screams, waking the children, causing Marisa to cry, and Michael to deny knowing how he got there. He begs Vicki to forgive him, and blames it all on booze.

  Michael’s drinking has increasingly been a problem over the past year. Until recently, he was known as a “straight arrow,” the calm and even-keeled one within the family. But then “something snapped,” as a family associate recalls. “Michael started drinking heavily and got depressed. He wasn’t a mean drunk, just reckless.”

  Concern over Michael’s drinking culminates in a family intervention earlier that same month, at which Michael agrees to check himself into rehab by February 1. Michael swears to Vicki that he will clean up his act. But there will be no waiting the extra week now. He checks in to Father Martin’s Ashley rehab center in Havre de Grace, Maryland, that same day, January 22, 1995. “I have come to recognize I had a dependence on alcohol,” Michael is quoted as saying in People.

  “No one has hidden behind alcoholism as an excuse for inappropriate behavior,” Michael’s younger brother, thirty-three-year-old Christopher Kennedy, says. “But all of us clearly understand the link.”

  News of Michael’s entry into rehab is surprising to outsiders but overshadowed by the death of his grandmother later that same day. The 104-year-old matriarch of the Kennedy family, the “indomitable” Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, dies of pneumonia at home in Hyannis Port, and is buried on January 24, 1995. Six of the other grandchildren, including Michael’s oldest sister, Kathleen, the new lieutenant governor of Maryland, serve as pallbearers for her funeral in the same church in Boston’s North End where Rose was baptized in 1890.

  Privately, the family is furious with Michael, but publicly, they close ranks to keep the sordid news from leaking out.

  “I wanted to kick his [ass],” Christopher Kennedy says of when he first heard the news about his brother Michael’s affair with the babysitter, but the natural impulse among the family, as always, is to circle the wagons. Word spreads quickly among the cousins. “We talk to each other a lot, partially because we don’t really know who we can trust,” explains Ted Jr.

  John F. Kennedy Jr. and his friend Stephen Styles-Cooper go to visit Michael in rehab about three weeks into his stay. The abstinence from alcohol may be working, but John Jr. is taken aback that his cousin seems as devoted to his teenage paramour as ever, even producing for them a photo of Marisa, which Michael tells them he’s kept hidden in his sock.

  “This is the girl you’re going to hell for?” Stephen Styles-Cooper recalls John Jr. exclaiming, pronouncing her “just a kid” and taking the photo away with them when they leave. On their four-hour-long trip back to New York City, Stephen says John seems “shut down,” remarking, “I couldn’t tell if he was angry, hurt, sad, confused…or what.”

  Whatever’s going through his friend’s mind, Stephen is surprised by what happens as they finally part: “[He] looked at me and said three words I never thought I’d hear coming from him: ‘Fucking Kennedy Curse.’”

  Chapter 49

  By April 1995, Michael is home from rehab and Marisa has moved out of the house—but he and the seventeen-year-old are still seeing each other. Associated Press photos even show her (but not Michael’s wife and kids) at the Kennedy compound on Labor Day 1995, causing John Jr. to reportedly observe, “Aunt Ethel must really be on the warpath.” Still, Vicki and Michael more or less manage to keep their marital problems out of the public eye—but they can’t keep a lid on local gossip.

  Especially not when it seems the affair has been an open secret among Marisa’s prep school classmates at Thayer Academy all along. The girl, whom People reports had been named “Most Beautiful” by her fellow students, has apparently been boasting about it throughout high school. “She used to brag all the time about sleeping with the Kennedy guy. But nobody believed her until the stories came out,” scoffs one former classmate. Marisa even “told people she had been caught in bed with him,” another one confirms.

  Over the next year, as Michael and the teen continue their relationship, the only people who somehow don’t seem to get wind of the affair are Marisa’s parents, June and Paul Verrochi. By the fall of 1996, however, enough people are talking that friends of the Verrochis finally broach their suspicions directly to June and Paul. When confronted by her parents, Marisa at first denies it…but then admits everything.

  According to J. Randy Taraborrelli in his book The Kennedy Heirs, Marisa’s father, Paul, marches directly over to Michael’s office and unloads on him in front of witnesses. “Paul asked me how I could do it,” Michael later tells a family member. “And he kept asking me and asking me and asking me. And the only thing I could think of was that I was sure someone with a heart could’ve answered the question. But that wasn’t me,” he says.
Michael’s own estimation of himself is “I’m not normal. I don’t feel things.”

  Vicki has had enough, and she and the children move out of the family home.

  Marisa starts her freshman year at Boston University and breaks things off with Michael.

  Though he tries to change Marisa’s mind, Michael also initially hopes to repair his marriage to Vicki, but by April 1997, the couple announces a separation after sixteen years of marriage.

  Yet what seems like a conclusion is only the beginning, since it’s soon after Vicki and Michael’s separation is announced that reporters from the Boston Globe break the salacious affair story. And while it’s no surprise that news of an alleged relationship between a Kennedy and a teenage babysitter is almost immediately picked up across the country, what is surprising is that no one in the Kennedy camp makes much attempt to deny it. There’s a tacit agreement that yes, the affair took place; the only real fight is over when it may have begun (in Massachusetts, the legal age of consent is sixteen).

  The press has a field day with this scandal, and Cohasset police launch inquiries into the statutory rape allegations, but true to form, the Kennedys clam up.

  As one family friend tells Vanity Fair, “I have a sense that all of the Kennedys are in a castle with a moat around it and a gangplank that lifts up, and they’re all in there with boiling oil for journalists. They’re in a siege mentality all the time, and I think it colors their whole relationship with other people.”

  That familial devotion is both admirable and a source of frustration to outsiders, many of whom view loyalty taken to this extent as disrespectful to the victims, even Mafia-esque. “The only time the family intervenes is when there’s an embarrassment in the press,” a close friend of the Kennedys points out. “The infraction is not considered important, only the public embarrassment.”