It Happened One Night

As I sat in the courtroom watching prosecutor Moira Lasch meander through her lame closing argument at the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, it struck me that I might be witnessing something historic: the beginning of the end of a certain kind of feminism.

For years, after all, women have been ceded boundless stretches of higher moral ground. Both nationally and in millions of homes, the debate has been informed by a set of female assumptions that by definition put men on the defensive: that a woman's viewpoint is inherently more credible than a man's; that when something goes wrong, the responsibility must be the man's; that the murky and often volatile mix of needs and passions that figure in human interaction can be governed by political theories and abstract rules. Week after week, year after year, the message has been nearly as evident on the pages of The New York Times as in the magazines at the nation's checkout counters: Women are victims and men are victimizers. Case closed.

At no time in recent memory had such a view been more earnestly espoused than in the month immediately preceding the Smith trial, in the wake of the Thomas-Hill standoff. Indeed, Palm Beach was supposed to have been Clarence and Anita all over again--another case of a courageous woman sallying forth to do battle in an arena where men make the rules. Only this time, said the supporters of the semi-anonymous accuser, the decision would be in the hands of decent citizens instead of politicians spouting phony pieties, so justice was likely to be done.

As I listened to Lasch drone on, her case in shambles, that view seemed almost impossibly dumb. During the last week of the trial, even most of those with the strongest ideological ties to the prosecution found excuses to distance themselves from the case. As Lasch faltered, her supporters backpedaled furiously, saying that because of the peculiarities of the principals and the ambiguities of the evidence, the trial would do nothing to resolve the larger questions at issue. The dead giveaway came when The New York Times' Anna Quindlen, a reliable gauge of wind direction in the Northeast's politically trendy precincts, backed away from her reflexive support of the accuser, even as her paper's weekly "Science Times" predictably weighed in with a report that "new research suggests that only a small minority of rapists are (continued on page 166)One Night(continued from page 78) sexual renegades . . . and that far more common are men with a normal sexual orientation who rape impulsively as the opportunity presents itself, often while on a date." On that very morning, as Lasch summed up, a party of Guardian Angels chanting "Shame! Shame! Shame!" outside the West Palm Beach courthouse were handing out leaflets demanding "Where is NOW and other woman's [sic] organizations? Their silence on this issue is deafening!"

What everyone but the Angels, and Lasch herself, seemed to grasp is that the prosecution's case had become a debacle. The men and women of the press---throughout the trial, a sort of antic Greek chorus providing a brand of no-holds-barred commentary that never found its way into print---considered Lasch a figure of derision, her every utterance likely to be greeted with gales of laughter. The prosecutor herself became that most tiresome of clichés: the feminist who doesn't get the joke.

Lasch's misfortune was that she embraced her role with such obvious relish. From the day she took on the case, she brought to it a grim self-righteousness that seemed right out of Feminist Central Casting. Literal-minded and monotonal, she bought every syllable out of Patricia Bowman's mouth, and it seemed inconceivable to her that anyone else would fail to do the same. In fact, as Bowman's version of events came under challenge, Lasch seemed so lost in the thicket of sexual politics as to be oblivious to the realities the rest of us live.

In the end, the prosecution asked the jury, and the entire world, to accept what seemed to be an intellectual shell game: that a strong and independent woman can, the morning after, declare herself helpless and vulnerable and be held accountable for nothing.

In contrast, the defense relied on common sense and common experience. For most in the vast viewing audience, comprising everyone from South American swingers to my aunt Rose in the Bronx, the central question was not whether the sex on the Kennedy lawn had been strictly consensual, but what the hell was Bowman doing there at 3:30 in the morning if she didn't expect something to happen?

In his summation, Smith's attorney Roy Black effectively laid waste to the state's case with a single, arch sentence: "[Lasch] keeps making the point that in spring break, in Florida, it's preposterous that a man and a woman would get together after knowing each other for a couple of hours and have sex."

Which is why, all these months afterward, Lasch remains the most memorable figure of the trial. Black was the stronger attorney. Willie Smith and Patty Bowman will one day be recalled merely as characters in a tawdry drama. But in Moira Lasch we found the embodiment of an argument that wouldn't wash.

•

By October 28, the day I arrived at the courthouse for the start of jury selection, the reporters who had been on the case from the start already had a pretty good fix on the prosecutor.

"What kind of underwear you think Moira wears?" called out one guy in the small room reserved for the print press, as we watched the battle over the admissibility of Bowman's scanties.

"Boxers," someone piped up.

"Flannel," added a woman from the wire services, "and battleship gray."

The mistake most of us made, however, was our assumption that the forbidding figure before us would soon begin throwing off star power. How many prosecutors outside the movies, after all, can boast of having nailed a character like Robert Spearman, who solicited hit men via Soldier of Fortune magazine to murder his wife and who then cultivated such a hatred of Lasch that, frustrated in his plan to escape prison to kill her, killed himself instead?

In fact, it should not have been so surprising that her performance was so at odds with her reputation. The standard south Florida felony prosecution tends to be such a slam-dunk affair that, as Newsweek's Miami bureau chief Spencer Reiss puts it, "even defense lawyers like Roy Black tend to measure their success not in acquittals but in how long it takes the jury to bring in a guilty verdict. The prosecutor points at a bunch of sullen Colombian guys at the defense table, points at the pile of dope on the evidence table, brings on a couple of Customs guys as witnesses and gets a few co-conspirators to sing."

That wasn't going to happen this time. As Reiss says, "Lasch wasn't going to flip Jean Smith and get her to testify against her son." Although the pressroom wisdom was running strongly against the prosecutor, almost all of the reporters had a vested interest in the prosecution at least making a game of it. There were those in TV and radio, in particular, who had it in for Willie. The scuzzier the show and the greater its demographic appeal among women, the more venomous was its bite. "Gentlemen, start your sewers," one of the Hard Copy guys joyously proclaimed at 8:30 that first morning, as Judge Mary Lupo called her court to order.

Which is hardly to suggest that the two dozen or so print reporters---almost every one of us at least a pretend cynic---brought any greater insight than the tabloid types. We just had a slightly better sense of decorum. But what many of the print people did have---especially those out of newsrooms where Anita Hill's version of things had been taken as gospel---was a slant on relations between the sexes that was more in sync with Ms. than with the mainstream.

It was evident even in casual conversation. "Can you believe her?" remarked one guy from a New York daily to a woman colleague after his first day's exposure to Lasch. "What a-----" He mouthed something under his breath.

"Bitch?" she offered.

He nodded. "You're allowed to say it, I'm not."

For all the genuine camaraderie in the pressroom, there was a distinct difference in attitudes, on what have come to be called gender issues, between those working for the powerful papers of the Northeast and those representing the rest of the country.

"It really hit me during Hill---Thomas," noted Laura Berman, a Detroit News columnist. "There was this huge gap between what I was reading in The New York Times---the standard elitist-feminist line about Anita Hill being this great heroine, and how she reflected the experience of all women--and what I was hearing among women in my own office out there in middle America, which was a lot of skepticism and speculation about her motives."

It was impossible to guess how much skepticism and speculation there would be Out There this time around. Unless, that is, one spent some time listening to the locals. Palm Beach is the ultimate silly place---where else is there a plague of grown-ups called Buffy and Muffy, Sunny and Bunny, Hap and Mac? But there, as across the bridge in West Palm Beach---a sterile, run-down, largely black inner city extending out into malls and suburban homes---the doubts about Patty Bowman's reliability were already pervasive. From shoppers in thrift shops on West Palm's South Dixie Highway to those doing the boutiques on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, from the elderly couples with whom I spent an evening at West Palm's Century Village to teenagers scooping Willie Vanilli and Lupo lemon sherbet at an ice cream parlor near Au Bar---almost everyone seemed to have at least as many doubts about the accuser as about the accused. Over lunch in the Courthouse Café, a building contractor accused of negligent homicide dismissed the whole case. "I mean, come on," he said, "you can always keep out of harm's way."

This all confirmed my own strong sense of things at the start: that Smith was getting a bum deal.

"Look," I insisted to the female lawyer, an old friend, sitting across the dinner table that first night, "most women just don't realize how tough it is to be a guy in a climate where male sexuality is under this kind of attack."

"Yeah," she smiled, "tell me about it. Let's put it this way: Would you allow your daughter to go out with Willie Smith?"

I snorted. "C'mon, my daughter's ten years old."

She tried again: "How will you feel about her going on dates at all, knowing that twenty-five percent of junior high school boys feel that, if they pay for dinner, they're entitled to sex?"

"I also have a little boy," I countered. "And frankly, I'm more worried about him being accused of something he didn't do."

Then again, the thing about this trial was how quickly almost everyone's preconceptions began to fray. By the close of the next day in court, I was already edging toward the understanding that neither sex was going to emerge from this case feeling vindicated.

•

From the start of the trial, the contrast between the prosecution and defense teams appeared to tell the story at a glance. On one side of the aisle, erect as nuns, sat Lasch and her even more forbidding sidekick, Ellen Roberts. On the other, flanking the defendant---himself looking like an eager and conscientious college kid---sat three of the easiest-going guys this side of the neighborhood sports bar, smiling as they whispered among themselves. At the end of their table sat jury selection expert Cat Bennett, perhaps the most vivid contrast to the women of the prosecution. Gravely ill with cancer---indeed, an almost spectral figure, with her alabaster skin and mass of bleached white-blonde hair---Bennett was as vulnerable as they come, a pretty, old-fashioned gal giving her all, and then some, for the guys.

Within five minutes, Roy Black felt like an old friend. Loose-limbed and amiable, a sort of Abe Lincoln in West Palm, he set the day's first prospective juror at ease with what sounded like an impromptu greeting. "I know you're probably a little nervous," he told her. "I guess we all are. Public speaking isn't easy for any of us." He paused briefly to introduce his client, "Will" (never again Willie) Smith, who, taken by surprise, stood up with a sudden, shy smile and nodded in the stranger's direction.

After five or six times watching Black go through this routine, the words practically verbatim, Willie's Jimmy Stewart reaction always right on cue, only a moron would be inclined to take the attorney at face value. This is the way it was going to be: Every move, every gesture carefully plotted and choreographed. And, too, when it got down to that, every word out of Willie's mouth.

The potential jurors, naturally, ate it up. Contrary to Black's evident fears, most were sympathetic toward his client. "If two people leave a bar together at ten in the evening," as a guy from Boynton Beach put it, expressing the common view, "it's different from two people who leave together at three in the morning."

"She sounds like a girl with at least one brain in her head," added a 57-year-old housewife, "but they tried to make it like she was completely innocent."

Not, of course, that Lasch was doing much to help her side. True to form---intellectually honest, as she undoubtedly saw it---she was coolly perfunctory with potential jurors, seeming not to give a good goddamn whether or not the citizens hated her guts.

Memorably, at least one clearly did. Florence Orbach, a 78-year-old former New Yorker, blew into the courtroom like a gust of salt air, chomping on a wad of gum and saying what the rest of us were thinking. That Kennedy men may be "smart, but when they get horny, their penises take over." That she herself never went to places like Au Bar "because at my age I don't need a gigolo." That the encounter in question "was an evening of utter stupidity."

Everyone present, from Black to Judge Lupo to the press, was vastly amused and relieved to have the diversion.

Everyone, that is, except the prosecutor. "You should smile," Orbach told her as she left the stand. "You have a pretty face." It was probably the best professional advice Lasch had ever gotten.

In response, the prosecutor called Orbach a "borderline incompetent."

Yet there was no sounder proof of Orbach's countercharge---that Lasch was "a horse's ass"---than something else that happened later in jury selection. Juror number 11, a prim, bespectacled blonde, told the court that her pocketbook had once been stolen from her car. But, she added, since she had been foolish enough to leave it there, "I asked for it."

This was what a cogent prosecutor should have known to avoid like poison: a juror who felt strongly about personal responsibility. Lasch let her slip by. The woman turned out to be Lea Haller, who would become Smith's most avid champion in the jury room. The night of the verdict, she took off her glasses, let down her tight blonde bun---"My God, Miss Jones, you're beautiful!"---and hung out with the celebrating lawyers at Au Bar.

•

By December 2, the day the trial was to begin in earnest, the momentum was already so clearly going the defense's way that almost everyone seemed to be using the term coined by The Palm Beach Post's Frank Cerabino to describe the courthouse: Will's World. Incredibly, the accused rapist was emerging as a sex symbol. Granted, few of the women screaming Smith's name outside the courthouse and lingering in the courthouse corridors in hopes of spotting him were precisely the sort you'd want to bring home to mother. But, who knows? Your mother isn't Jean Smith.

There was absolutely no way to fathom what was going on in the Kennedy women's heads. Long-suffering doesn't begin to tell it. Before it was over, all Jean's sisters and one sister-in-law would be here---Pat, Eunice and Ethel, along with Jean, each looking unexpectedly older, in that monied, weather-beaten way, than the next. They heard some graphic and appalling characterizations of Willie's behavior that night, and of his treatment of women in general. Still, like Rose before them, they never showed a thing. More than once I found myself part of a group of reporters speculating on what they made of it.

"Nothing," was the oddly plausible explanation of a woman from one Florida paper, "nothing at all. These people are in deep denial. It's an old family trait."

Without question, all of them were on hand as props---on display for the jury and in service of an agenda that extended well beyond William Smith. This was never more apparent than immediately after Patty Bowman's initial afternoon of testimony when, at least briefly, things looked rocky for the defense. The family left the courtroom in silence, as usual; but this time, instead of slipping out the back hallway, they walked the gauntlet of reporters and then, as the cameras clicked away, stopped for a long, communal embrace.

"Roy Black strikes again," whispered the reporter next to me.

•

It has been widely observed that Black won his case that very first morning when Judge Lupo ruled that the testimony of three other accusing women was inadmissible. But that morning was also the emotional high-water mark for the prosecution. Arguing for the inclusion of the other women was not Lasch but her colleague with the drill-sergeant hair, Ellen Roberts.

Roberts looks like the sort of sourpuss who used to cause the Little Rascals to gasp when they found her substituting for Miss Crabtree. "Ever notice how Ellen's hair reminds you of Moira's personality?" one of my colleagues whispered to me in court.

As good as her argument was, of course, it was a loser. That's probably why Lasch had passed it on in the first place. According to Florida's Williams Rule, evidence of prior acts is admissible only if the prosecution can demonstrate a clear and unique modus operandi identical to the one in the case at hand. (The Williams in question was a rapist given to hiding in the backs of women's cars at crowded shopping malls; claiming, if confronted, that he thought they were relatives' cars; always terrorizing his victims with the same words and the same weapon.) What the prosecution had here were three women, each of whom claimed that, under markedly different circumstances, Willie Smith tried to overpower and sexually assault them.

But, at least for a little while, Roberts made us believe she might actually pull it off. Her voice is blue-collar Southern and, in striking contrast to her partner's, it has power and dramatic range. This woman was pissed and her words came in a rush. "The attacks, Judge, on all of these women were violent, sudden and without provocation. They were pinned down, and they were rough attacks. . . . He ordered each of them not to resist: 'Be quiet, Lisa, shut up!' Told Lynn there was nothing wrong with what he was doing, it was OK. Told Michele, 'Stop fighting.' " A millisecond pause and Roberts' blue-collar voice dropped. "And told Patricia, 'Stop it, bitch.'"

She went on to describe a predatory pattern in which Willie sought out "attractive young brunettes" at "a party, a picnic or a night spot" and "enticed them into his lair."

Roberts probably knew she had gone too far with this last bit, borrowing the language of the Victorian potboiler. That was the problem with the whole argument: The evidence did not meet the Williams Rule, and Black pounced. His voice ringing with incredulity, he made the point that of course Will met women in such places. Where else would he meet them? As she was bound to by law, Judge Lupo ruled it inadmissible.

Still, the questions about the defendant, always difficult to shrug away, had never been more insistent. In the disallowed depositions---snapped up by reporters at 50 bucks a pop at Sir Speedy, the copy shop that was growing rich at press expense---a medical school classmate describes Smith as aloof to the point of rudeness; a far cry from the gangly, good-natured guy we were seeing every day. None of the women saw the situation in which she found herself with him as remotely romantic. One moment, there would be innocuous chitchat, the next, the woman would find herself under physical assault and desperately fight back. Then, like a character of Stephen King's, Smith would flip right back again.

What made the transcripts all the more persuasive was that we began hearing stories about other women out there, dug up by assorted press people, who had reportedly undergone similarly unsettling experiences with the defendant. "We only officially know about the three," noted Newsweek's Spencer Reiss, "but let's face it, lots of us know about lots more. So does Moira Lasch. She knows of at least sixteen others. That's part of the reason she's so venomous. She is convinced that she has a real, live rapist on her hands, and she can't fucking pin him."

•

Denied the Williams Rule women, the prosecution found itself in even bigger trouble. "Star witness" Anne Mercer quickly set the pace with her acknowledgment that she had received $40,000 from A Current Affair to tell Steve Dunleavy her tawdry tale. That was more than enough of an opening for Black. The woman was moral mincemeat in his hands. It was like Zorro dueling fat, stupid Sergeant García.

Watching Mercer, one had the inescapable sense that no one had ever made a single demand on this woman, intellectual or moral, in her entire life. If she had any regret at all about the whole thing, it was probably not that she had grabbed the money, but that she had waited so long to grab it, thus reducing her take by a full $110,000. Even that did not prevent her from leaving the courthouse at the side of Dunleavy, who was back a few minutes later, executing a victory lap around the pressroom.

Mercer's embarrassment was hardly hers alone; it instantly cast doubt on Bowman's own credibility. After all, who in the world would make a bosom buddy of a zero like Mercer?

In fact, it was understood by those who'd studied the Bowman-Mercer crowd that venality and opportunism were pretty much the norm. A collection of washouts and wanna-bes at the outer fringes of the Palm Beach social set, few seemed to feel any sense of responsibility to anything larger than themselves. "These are people who really just think they're beyond the rules," noted Lisa Ocker of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, "even when it comes to little things like paying parking tickets." Although almost all were regulars at Palm Beach's expensive night spots, few were on intimate terms with regular work. Many of them had problems with drugs or alcohol, and hardly anybody could do more than fleetingly sustain a relationship.

Patty Bowman's past suggested that she was not much different from the rest. From the statements she had given the police, plus a conversation with a polygraph expert released in transcript form, we knew that she, too, was a trust-funder. That she had been sexually abused as a child. That she seemed to have an abiding antipathy toward men, including the sporting-goods salesman who fathered her child. That---big surprise---she had a history of late-night partying and drug use.

Which is why Bowman's appearance in the courthouse proved such a stunner.

"Who's that?" someone in the pressroom said with sudden urgency as the hallway camera picked up a prim figure moving toward the courtroom door.

"Patty!" came three voices at once.

A half instant and she was gone.

"She looks fuckable," mused a woman near me who almost instantly put a hand to her lips and began to turn crimson. "I can't believe I said that."

In fact, for the next half hour, I had no better idea of what she looked like than did the rest of the world: In the pressroom, we got the blue dot, too.

But, by a stroke of good fortune, I happened to be next in the magazine pool to get the courtroom pass. So I was on hand for the headline-making stuff.

As she sat there in her gray suit and pearls, she was far more presentable than anyone had anticipated: better spoken and---how to put this?---since we'd sort of been expecting another Mercer, surprisingly respectable. Then again, for a mere 30-year-old, she looked to have a hell of a lot of miles on her. As a colleague observed, those millions seeing "the hair, the pearls and the blob are seeing her at her best."

He was speaking not just of her looks but of her demeanor. Bowman started off with a rush, describing her devotion to her young child, beset from birth with severe health problems, and the ways in which she herself had been remade by motherhood. It was a litany that cast her in the best imaginable light as sympathetic and responsible. For a few minutes, Smith's involuntary smirk looked pretty strained. But in a twist on the feminist construct, it was Lasch who just didn't get it. The impatient prosecutor moved her far too quickly to her account of the alleged crime.

Here, too, Bowman came across as credible---but, tellingly, much less so in person than behind the blur on TV. This was someone who exhibited emotion in an extremely disconcerting way. She seemed able to begin crying virtually at will, without warning. Just as suddenly, she would become composed again. This did not necessarily indicate untruthfulness, only oddness. But for someone interested in selling a story to a jury, oddness is likely to be almost as damaging as lying, especially when the story being told is as full of holes as this one.

Indeed, as the minutes passed and the initial surprise at Bowman's strength of character faded, the questions became more insistent. When did she take off those pantyhose? Why hadn't anyone heard her scream? And, most pointedly, were we really to believe that a single young woman, urged by her mother and her therapist to go out and have a good time, had no romantic interest in a personable young doctor who was also a Kennedy? Most of us, after all, live in a place a lot closer to Will's World than to Moira's.

By the following morning, with Black pressing his cross examination, most everyone in the pressroom who had experienced Bowman close up was saying the same kind of thing.

"You notice," someone remarked, as the blob met one of the defense attorney's gently skeptical queries with a sudden sob, "how she's now doing that, not just when she's describing the attack, but every time her credibility is questioned?"

"Hey," laughed The Detroit News's Laura Berman, "sometimes crying is the best defense."

In fact, increasingly, as Black continued to hammer away at the memory lapses and the improbabilities, crying seemed to be her only defense, aside from the fierce indignation of the deeply wronged.

It was a role inherently filled with contradictions---anonymous victim as avenging angel---but she played it to the hilt. No, she insisted each time Black responded to one of her crying jags by calling for a recess, all she wanted was to get through this ordeal and get on with her life. And yet, somehow, I was not at all surprised when she turned up two weeks later on national TV with Diane Sawyer. In Bowman's own mind, there was evidently not even the appearance of hypocrisy.

As Bowman prepared to leave the stand, she fixed Black with a gaze worthy of Mistress Moira herself and closed with a flourish: "Your client raped me!"

It was hard to find anyone who doubted she meant it. But by now, even among those who wished her well, the doubts were about Patty herself, and they ran the gamut from her character to her sanity. Time's Cathy Booth, who last year worked on a cover story on date rape, noted that we were seeing a classic high-risk candidate for such a situation. "There's often just this desperate seeking for connection with these women, and it creates a perception gap. You look at Patty---emotionally starved, hurting---and here she finds this 'nice' guy who's gonna disprove her theory that all men are mean and bad. And she gets so caught up in this illusion, she pays no attention to the signals she's putting out herself, let alone what the creep is really about."

When Smith launched into his testimony, he began with an echo of the refrain Black had earlier used to such effect with these same jurors---"I'm very nervous, but I remember what you said to me, 'Tell the truth and you'll be fine.'" Willie moved quickly to his account of his decision to have sex with a woman his defense team was portraying as psychologically unstable.

In a more rational time---which is to say, at just about any other moment in history---we might have regarded such a story as depraved, poignant, tragic. Indeed, it was particularly tragic for those of us who came of age fired by the hope and contagious idealism of the Kennedy years. How many of us could have imagined it would come to this?

"Camelot," someone said, shaking his head. "They should call it Come-a-lot."

We had just passed the part where Smith had, or might have had, his second orgasm in a half hour, this one on the compound lawn.

"Don't knock it," smirked a woman across the room, "I wouldn't mind meeting a guy like that."

" 'Can I come in with you?' " Smith had Bowman asking him now. His response: "I said it was late, I'm tired, I'm going to go to bed."

"'And'"---Time's Booth mockingly filled in what was unspoken---"'I've already gotten my rocks off.'"

Smith was relying on what might be called the asshole defense: no crime in being one of those. In his case, that defense was particularly plausible. Calculated as his story plainly was, in contrast to Bowman's version, it read as true as a sonnet by Shakespeare.

"Well," someone in the pressroom sarcastically summed up, "I guess it was just Willie's incredibly bad luck to get accused of rape."

"Right," nodded someone else. "But his incredibly good luck to get accused the one time he actually might not have done it."

Perhaps out of frustration, Lasch seemed to regard the defendant as fair game even for attacks not sanctioned by law. She so often made assertions unsupported by evidence, it became common-place that she was angling for a mistrial. And she met any suggestion of fallibility on Patty's part, or her own, with almost biblical righteousness. Lasch apparently felt that, being by definition in the right, her side ought not to be held to the usual standards.

In no way was this more apparent than in her attitude toward the media. Over and over she complained to Judge Lupo about the ways in which the defense was using the press to portray Smith in a favorable light. This, after she herself had damned him to months of vicious publicity by releasing the statements of the three other accusers. Nothing at all seemed to drive Lasch crazier than Smith's characterization of the charge as "a damnable lie." "He tried to make sure," as she was still complaining in her summation, "that nobody would believe her!"

Well, yeah.

More than once, even Black, seemingly prepared for anything, was clearly stunned by things that came out of Lasch's mouth. In that same summation, almost off the cuff, the prosecutor asserted that the rape had occurred because "the defendant's ego can't take this rejection." While such a characterization may well resonate with countless female viewers, it was unsupported by a single word of testimony. "Have we gotten so far in this case," wondered the defense lawyer, incredulous, in his closing, "that you can ask the jury to convict somebody on evidence that's not on the record? You can just make up something out of whole cloth, and that's enough to send someone to prison?"

Lasch probably wouldn't go quite that far, at least not publicly. But that seemed to be precisely what she believed---as long as it was a woman doing the asserting and she bought it herself.

In the end, it was that attitude, rather than any lack of preparation, that led Lasch to so many strategic gaffes. (The most glaring was her tardiness in trying to arrange for the testimony of a rape-trauma expert who might have provided an explanation for Patty's many memory lapses. Judge Lupo disallowed the late witness and the prosecution's case suffered another devastating blow.) The prosecutor was so apparently rooted in her own worldview, she literally did not seem to have grasped that anyone, even the other side, would dare vigorously hold the accuser to account.

Along the way, even most of us in the pressroom who'd started on opposite sides moved to the same conclusion. During the 77 minutes that the jury was out, the guy from Court TV took a poll in the pressroom. Among the 48 souls responding, not one believed Willie would be convicted, but at least 30 thought he was guilty.

Guilty, that is, if not precisely as charged by his accuser and the state, of something. "The problem," as one guy summed up the prevailing view, "is that we're dealing with a pair of dysfunctional personalities. He's a rapist and she's a liar."

Such a view naturally infuriates the Moira Lasches in our midst who are so intent upon reading the world in black and white. But it stands as perhaps this trial's most meaningful legacy that this opinion was so remarkably widespread. Even before the verdict was in, a new consensus had begun to emerge, both in the press and in living rooms across the land: a visceral understanding that, whatever happened between Willie Smith and Patty Bowman, that night ought to be taken as a cautionary tale by men and women both. For, in an era of chronic confusion between the sexes, a time rife with misunderstanding, madness and malice, each of us must finally bear the burden of personal accountability. In the end, this has been Moira Lasch's legacy. The question is, does she get it even now?

"There were those who had it in for Willie. The scuzzier the show, the more venomous was its bite."