“Mrs. Smith,” Tess began, “will you tell the court how you came to be acquainted with the defendant?”
“I worked as a secretary in Senator Willmont’s office in Washington, D.C., from January to June of 1984,” the rebuttal witness said in a naturally husky voice.
“Did you enjoy working there?”
“For the most part. The job was exciting, the pace was incredible, and there were really important people coming and going all the time that, before then, I had only read about in newspapers or seen on television.”
“This was important to you?”
“I graduated Brigham Young University with a degree in political science and all I wanted to do was work in Washington. I was twenty-two years old and full of ideals, and this was my first exposure to the world of power and politics.”
“You said you liked your job, for the most part. What part of the job didn’t you like?”
“I didn’t like it much when the senator was there.”
“Why not?”
“Because he used to hang around my desk a lot, making comments that embarrassed me.”
“What sort of comments?”
“Oh, things like how distracting I was to have around, or how he wished he were single when he looked at me, or how he could be arrested for what he was thinking when I walked across the room. Things like that.”
“Did you take these remarks seriously?”
“I thought he was probably kidding, but it made me very uncomfortable anyway.”
“Did you discuss how you felt with Senator Willmont? Did you ask him to stop?”
“Heavens, no. I was just a kid, all on my own in the big city, and I really needed my job. I was afraid if I said anything to him I might get fired. But after a while I got up enough courage to tell his administrative assistant. She said that was just the way he was and I should try not to let it bother me. But she must have seen how upset I was because she promised she would talk to him. I guess she did because he stopped doing it for a while.”
In the gallery, Mary Catherine nodded slowly. She remembered the lovely young woman almost in tears, and the senator’s shrugging off her remonstrations with a laugh.
“Then what happened?”
“About a month or so later, it started again, only it got worst. Even though I wasn’t his personal secretary, he would ask me to bring him coffee or files or something, and then when I came into his office he would stare me up and down. He said he’d like it better if I wore low-cut clothes because it would show off my bosom, and he wished miniskirts were still in style so he could see more of my legs.”
“When the senator made these remarks, weren’t you able to just laugh them off?”
“I come from a very conservative, very religious family, Miss Escalante, where making remarks about such matters just isn’t considered decent. He made me feel like I had no value as a person, and it was humiliating.”
“What did you do?”
“I started looking for another job.”
“Did you find one?”
“I had a final interview with a congresswoman from Connecticut scheduled for the third Wednesday in June. She really liked me and I think I would have gotten the job.”
“Your Honor, I fail to see any relevance in a discussion of Mrs. Smith’s employment history,” Sutton objected.
“If the court will allow me to proceed,” Tess rejoined, “I’m sure it will find this witness’s testimony to be entirely relevant.”
“Objection overruled,” Judge Washington decided. “But let’s get to the point, Miss Escalante.”
“What happened on the day before your final interview with the congresswoman from Connecticut?”
“The senator’s secretary was out sick,” Maggie replied, “and the senator asked me to stay and retype a paper he had written. I didn’t really want to, but he promised it would only be for an hour or two and I didn’t know how to refuse without sounding like a real idiot, and I needed the overtime anyway, so I agreed. But he kept making changes and I had to keep retyping, and it was almost ten o’clock by the time I was finished. He offered to buy me dinner, in appreciation, but I said it was too late. So then he offered to drive me home. He said it was the least he could do.”
In the second row on the right side of the gallery, the Sullivan Street set began to look at one another with growing anticipation and Ted sat up a little straighter in his seat.
Across the aisle, Randy felt the cold knot that had been occupying the pit of his stomach begin to tighten. Beside him, Mary Catherine sat like a stone.
“Did you accept his offer?” Tess inquired.
“Well, it was late,” Maggie replied, “I was tired and the buses weren’t very reliable at that hour. Besides, he hadn’t been offensive during the evening, and I didn’t want him to think I was rude, so yes, I let him drive me home.”
She shivered and clutched at the arms of her chair.
“Would you like a glass of water?” Tess asked gently.
The witness shook her head. “I’m okay,” she said in an uneven voice. “It’s just hard to talk about, even after all these years.”
“Take your time.”
Maggie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I lived in Alexandria, which is about forty-five minutes out of the city, and when we got there he asked if he could come in and use the bathroom, being that it was such a long drive back to Rock Creek Park, where he lived. The apartment was a mess. My roommate had just left for vacation and half her wardrobe was left where she’d dropped it and I didn’t really want to invite him in. But how do you tell a United States senator that he can’t come in and go to the bathroom because your roommate’s closet is all over the floor? So I let him in and then I just waited by the front door to let him right out again. But when he came out of the bathroom he was taking off his jacket and untying his tie and he said, ‘You can close the door—I’m not planning on leaving just yet.’“ The former secretary took another deep breath. “And then he raped me.”
A startled gasp rose up from every corner of the packed courtroom and met the echo of Margaret Holden Smith’s words.
“Your Honor, I object to this totally uncorroborated testimony!” the Silver Fox cried.
“Sit down, Counselor!” Oliver Wendell Washington barked. “You’ll have your chance to cross-examine.”
“Senator Robert Willmont raped you?” Tess pressed the witness.
“Yes,” Maggie confirmed. “He told me I had been asking for it for months, teasing him, enticing him with my sexy dresses and phony modesty, and it was time to end the game. He forced himself on me, and when I tried to resist—tried to scream—he beat me, slapping me with his open hand and punching me with his fist. When he finished with me, he got up and straightened his clothes and told me maybe it would be better if I didn’t come back to work at his office. I told him I had no intention of coming back. I told him I was going to the police.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He laughed. He said I could do whatever I wanted but he would deny everything, and who did I think the police would believe—a respected United States senator or a nobody sex-pot who thought she could sleep her way to the top? Then he started to leave, but right at the door he stopped and came back. He said, on second thought, he didn’t want there to be any hard feelings between us, and then he sat down on my sofa and wrote out a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“The defendant wrote you a check for a quarter of a million dollars?”
“Objection!” Sutton called. “Witness is testifying to material not in evidence.”
“Sustained.”
Tess walked over to the prosecution table and picked up a sheet of paper. “Your Honor, at this time, I would like to introduce People’s exhibit seventy-six, a Xerox copy of a bank draft, number 8038, drawn on account 331-020-665, dated June 20, 1984, in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, written to Margaret Holden and signed by the defendant.”
“Objection!” Sutton cried. “Best evidence, Your Honor. There’s no proof that any such check ever existed. This Xerox could be a forgery, or it could be an altered version of a check relating to an entirely different matter.”
“This is not best evidence,” Tess agreed. “We would much prefer that the senator provide us with the original.”
There was a hurried conversation between defendant and attorney.
The Silver Fox sighed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. It seems that, like most honest, hard-working people, the Senator does not keep personal records for longer than the seven years required by the IRS. Whatever checks he may have written in 1984 have been destroyed.”
“Then I ask the court to accept this photocopy in lieu of the original,” Tess countered.
“Approach,” Washington barked, covering his microphone. “I assume you have precedents, Miss Escalante?” he asked.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Okay, into chambers.”
The judge suspended proceedings with a bang of his gavel. A well-armed Anne Jenks followed Tess and the defense contingent out of the courtroom. Ten minutes later, when they reappeared, Tess had a slight smile on her face and Hal Sutton was trying to conceal a scowl.
“I’m going to overrule the objection,” Judge Washington declared for the record, as his bowel complained. “Subject to controverting testimony or presentation of the original check, the photocopy will be entered into evidence.”
“Exception!” Sutton snapped.
“Noted,” Washington snapped back. “You may continue, Miss Escalante.”
“Where did this copy come from, Mrs. Smith?” Tess asked as the trial continued.
“I made it,” the witness replied. “When the senator gave it to me, he said it would be good only if I left Washington immediately and never said a word to anyone about what happened. He said if I didn’t, he would see to it that I never worked in Washington again, and that my family would be ruined, too. He said he had the resources and the power to do that.”
“What did you do?”
“I’m ashamed to say I took the check. I was scared to death. After all, he was a big important man, and I figured he was probably right. Who was going to take my word over his after I’d let him drive me home and then let him into my apartment late at night? All he would have to say was that I consented. How could I prove I didn’t? But I wanted to have something, just in case he changed his mind and tried to hurt my family anyway. So, right after he left, I went to an all-night store where they had a Xerox machine, and I made the copy. Then I went to the hospital.”
“Your Honor, at this time, I would like to introduce into evidence People’s exhibit seventy-seven, a copy of Margaret Holden’s hospital record on the night of June 20, 1984.”
Sutton took a perfunctory look at the document and shrugged. “No objection.”
“What injuries, if any, did you suffer that night, Mrs. Smith?” the ADA asked.
“I had a black eye, a fractured cheekbone, multiple bruises and two crushed ribs.”
In the gallery, Mary Catherine silently began to cry.
“Your Honor, the hospital record just entered into evidence will show that Margaret Holden did indeed suffer, and was treated for, those injuries on the night of June 20, 1984.” Tess turned back to the witness. “Did you talk to the police?”
“Yes. The hospital said they had to call them. But I was so scared that I told the officer I didn’t get a good look at the man who raped me.”
“And then you left Washington?”
“Yes. The very next day. I went home to Utah. I didn’t call anyone before I left. I didn’t even go back to the office to clean out my desk. I was so embarrassed. I knew how I looked. I didn’t know how to explain.”
“You kept your silence for eight years,” Tess observed. “Why are you breaking it now?”
“Out of guilt, I think,” Margaret Holden Smith replied. “And because he can’t hurt me anymore. When Sergeant Pope found me, I’d been following the story in the news, and all the time I was thinking, if I’d been stronger back then, if I’d stood up to him instead of taking his dirty money and running away with my tail between my legs like a kicked dog, maybe Karen Doniger wouldn’t have had to go through what she did.”
“Objection!” Sutton exclaimed.
“Sustained. Confine your answers to only those facts in evidence, Mrs. Smith,” Washington advised.
“I have no more questions, Your Honor,” Tess said.
Tears were running down the witness’s cheeks. “It wasn’t fair, Miss Escalante—all I ever wanted, my whole life, was to be a part of the process and work in Washington. I was good at my job. I was learning. I could have gone places. It wasn’t fair that he was allowed to take that away from me.”
“No,” Tess agreed. “It wasn’t.”
* * *
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Sutton snapped later that evening.
“I didn’t think it was that important,” Robert said.
“Not that important?”
“It was her word against mine—how was I supposed to know the cunt would make a copy of the check?”
“Is what she said true? Did you rape her?”
“Of course not,” Robert dismissed the idea. “Why would I have to rape anyone? So maybe I got a little rough with her, but that’s all. She’d been coming on to me for months, with her tight clothes and her holier-than-thou attitude. She wanted me to take her home that night. She was clearly giving me the message. So I gave her what she wanted. I only wrote the check because it was my first term in the Senate and I didn’t want any problems.”
“You should have been honest with me, Robert,” his attorney declared, massaging his temples. “Then maybe I could have prevented this. At the very least, I could have moved to exclude past behavior.”
“We couldn’t do that,” the senator reminded him. “We needed to be able to discredit Doniger, remember?”
“Except that it didn’t quite work out that way, did it?” Sutton retorted. “Instead, Escalante set a trap and we walked right into it, like a pair of first-year associates.”
“The bitch,” Robert mumbled. “So now what do we do?”
“We can argue irrelevance, we can try to discredit, we can attempt to paint this Margaret Smith as the whore of Capitol Hill, we can move to exclude, but I don’t know. I’m very much afraid the prosecution has established perjury.”
“Okay, maybe I made a mistake,” Robert admitted. “Maybe I should have told you about Maggie. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so cavalier on the stand when Escalante pressed me about the infidelity issue. But what happened back then has nothing to do with this case. I didn’t rape Karen Doniger, Hal. Believe me, she asked for it.”
“That may be,” the Silver Fox said, “but I’m no longer sure I can convince the jury of that.”
Sutton spent most of Monday trying to undo some of the damage that Maggie Holden Smith had done. He called for a mistrial. Judge Washington denied. He tried to have the witness’s entire testimony stricken. Again, Washington denied. He tried to discredit her story. He harped on her refusal to identify her assailant to the police. He suggested that the senator might have had cause to interpret her actions as provocative. He even went so far as to speculate that she had asked the senator to drive her home that night, instead of the other way around, and perhaps even invited him into her apartment in an attempt to further her career. Then he sought to intimate that she had set the whole thing up as a blackmail scheme. Finally, he dredged up a handwriting expert who was willing to testify that it was possible the Xeroxed check was a forgery.
It wasn’t clear whether his effort had any significant impact on the jury, but the media, which had since April been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the senator, were suddenly scrambling like cockroaches in a bright light.
nine
Closing arguments were presented on Tuesday. Sutton argued eloquently and vigorously that his client
was simply the innocent victim of political sabotage. It didn’t seem to matter that he had been unable to prove this theory with direct evidence and sworn testimony, and he played on the socio-economic climate of San Francisco to hammer his point home.
“The one man who can make a difference,” he declared, “the one man with the vision to change this country for the better—that man cannot be allowed to survive. Why not? Because he’s the only real threat to the superwealthy who, thanks to twelve long years of incompetent government, have gotten America right where they want it—with the poor getting poorer, and the rich getting richer. One man stands in their way. Robert Drayton Willmont. A rich man who refuses to play their self-serving little games. And how better to rid themselves of this very real threat than to have a woman cry rape!”
In the gallery, Amanda Drayton Willmont nodded.
Mitch grinned. “It’s a downright conspiracy.”
“Cry rape today, ladies and gentlemen,” Sutton exhorted, “and the whole world stops to listen. The images it conjures up are lurid and loathsome. A woman entices a man into a compromising situation and then claims he took advantage of her. How does he defend himself without sounding like even more of a heel than he would had he actually done the deed?”
“He’s a heel, all right,” Jenna murmured.
Elizabeth Willmont sat beside her mother-in-law. She had swallowed a handful of pills during the noon recess and now she was twelve years old again, basking in the glory of a Denver summer.
“There are people walking among us who just could not let this man become President of the United State,” Sutton said, looking directly at each juror. “They are people who will stop at nothing to preserve what they have, at the expense of the rest of us. And they found a way to destroy him, didn’t they? They found a middle-aged ex-groupie who would agree to cry rape.”
The attorney paced back and forth for a moment.
“Could it have happened the way Karen Doniger said it did?” he wondered aloud. “It could have. After all, she had to concoct a believable story, or there would have been no case. But couldn’t it just as well have happened exactly the way the defendant said it did? Couldn’t he have been drawn innocently into the middle of an insidious plot? Of course he could have.”
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