Smith Seeks AIDS Test on His Accuser : Rape: The court motion citing the woman's 'reputation of promiscuity' comes a day after a call for the suspect to be tested.

Smith Seeks AIDS Test on His Accuser : Rape: The court motion citing the woman’s ‘reputation of promiscuity’ comes a day after a call for the suspect to be tested.

By RONALD J. OSTROW

May 31, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — William Kennedy Smith, facing an AIDS test at the request of the woman who accuses him of rape, asked Florida authorities on Thursday to give her the same examination, citing previously undisclosed testimony about her “reputation of promiscuity.”

In a cross-motion filed with the trial court here, Smith’s lawyers, on the eve of his arraignment, accused prosecutor Moira K. Lasch of seeking a headline when she asked the court Wednesday to authorize testing his blood for AIDS.

Lasch asked for the AIDS test after an FBI analysis of fluids recovered from the 29-year-old woman during a rape examination established that she and Smith almost certainly had sexual relations. Smith is the nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), and the rape allegedly took place when the two were on the grounds of the Kennedy family estate here over the Easter weekend.

“If asked, Mr. Smith would have readily consented to the requested tests, and under the (Florida) statutes cited by the prosecutor there would be no point to asking this court to order an HIV test where Mr. Smith had already given his consent . . . “ Mark P. Schnapp, Smith’s lawyer, told the court.

“Of course, the state would then have had to forgo the press attention it continues to seek in this case.”

In his motion, Schnapp also said that Kenneth Brown, a witness located by Smith’s private investigators, told Lasch on Wednesday in a sworn statement that the woman has a “reputation of promiscuity, and that as recently as January she attended a party with two of her sexual partners.”

He raised the point in arguing that Smith’s “risk of (AIDS) infection” is at least as great as the woman’s.

Brown, a Boca Raton, Fla., resident, is the boyfriend of Ashley Murphy, a friend of the woman. Murphy said she drove the woman home from the Kennedy family’s estate after the sexual assault allegedly took place, according to the police investigative report.

“Certainly, the fact that (the woman) is the complaining witness is no assurance that she does not carry the AIDS virus,” Smith’s lawyers told the court.

In a related development, a summary of a polygraph test given to the woman on April 22 by an examiner for the Palm Beach Police Department said the alleged victim told of considering suicide “since the incident and all the publicity.”

A copy of the 13-page summary by Warren D. Holmes, a Miami polygraph examiner, was provided to The Times. It said the woman told of being “intimate with seven different men in the past five years.”

In describing the three kisses she and Smith exchanged before the alleged assault, the woman said they “were not that sexually enticing,” Holmes said. “Nor was there any sexual conversation which would have acted as a catalyst to any sexual act.”

“It is her opinion that Smith raped her because he did not like being rejected,” Holmes quoted her as telling him.

In concluding that the woman had showed no deception on key elements of her accusation, Holmes noted that he had to consider such “major variables” as her past illegal drug use, “her history of periodic psychological counseling, memory lapses, influence of alcohol consumed preceding the alleged attack and her current emotional state.”

Despite the variables, Holmes said, it was his opinion that the woman did not lie in responding “to the pertinent test questions.”

It is not clear whether under Florida’s strict rape shield law evidence of the woman’s sexual history can be introduced at trial. The police report on the case cited previous pregnancies of the woman, a single mother with a 2-year-old-daughter, and said she had used cocaine as recently as December.

But attempts to introduce and block such testimony seem likely to assure that Smith’s trial will be marked by headline-generating charges and countercharges.

It is not known whether Smith will come into court for his arraignment today. Florida law does not require that he appear. But he is expected to plead innocent to the charges of sexual battery and battery--allegations that he has denounced as “outrageous lies.”