Woman Identifies Smith In Courtroom Confrontation

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - William Kennedy Smith stood up in court today and faced his accuser as the dark-haired woman identified him as the man she met at a trendy discotheque.

The woman whose charge of rape touched off headlines around the world took the stand and spoke calmly as she began outlining her version of the events of the morning of March 30.

"Did you meet the defendant, William Kennedy Smith, on March 30, 1991?" asked the prosecutor, Moira Lasch.

"Yes," said the woman.

"Do you see him in court?" she asked.

"He's standing right there," she said as Smith arose and faced her.

The 30-year-old woman, whose name is being shielded, spoke of making plans with her friend, Anne Mercer, to visit another friend on Easter Weekend.

The woman says Smith, 31, the nephew of Sen. Edward Kennedy, tackled and raped her on the lawn of the Kennedy family's Palm Beach estate March 30. He says she lied about the encounter because she became angry after they had consensual sex. The charges could bring 4 1/2 years in prison.

Earlier today, Smith's attorney, Roy Black, harshly questioned Mercer during her cross-examination, suggesting the witness lied about who took an urn from the estate and whether the senator watched the sexual encounter.

"But she never told me that he was watching," Mercer testified as Smith's rape trial entered its third day. "I made that assumption by her affirmative display of hysteria."

Another witness, Dr. Rebecca Prostko, an emergency-room doctor who treated the alleged victim March 30, told the court today that the woman would have had to have been "sophisticated in medical techniques" to have faked evidence that she was raped.

Kennedy said in a pretrial statement he had gone to sleep and saw nothing of Smith and the woman at the estate.

Mercer testified yesterday of finding the Jupiter woman disheveled, crying and hysterical when she called her to the Kennedy estate to pick her up after the alleged rape.

Before she concluded her testimony today, Mercer agreed however that the woman was able to get into her own car and find her way back to Mercer's home, which she had been to only once.

Black questioned her about why a photo of two of Smith's small cousins, a legal pad and an urn were taken from the estate.

The alleged victim has said she took the photo and legal pad to prove she was at the estate, while Mercer's boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, took the urn because he thought the Jupiter woman wanted him to.