Smith ‘Broke’ From Rape Case, Aide Says : Trial: She states that Kennedy heir has dipped into his inheritance to pay legal bills. Selection of a six-person jury continues.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —  William Kennedy Smith is borrowing to pay the mounting legal bills for his rape trial defense and has complained that he’s now “broke,” a spokeswoman for Smith said Friday.

At the second day of jury selection for the trial, spokeswoman Barbara Gamarekian said the nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has dipped into his inheritance to pay bills that some lawyers have estimated at more than $1 million.

She said Smith had complained to her, “I’m broke,” but had insisted to other members of his family that he wanted to cover the costs himself. “He said he wanted it that way,” she said.

Smith told her that he believed his reputation has now been “ruined . . . that it will be difficult to repair, no matter what,” Gamarekian said.

“It’s been a nightmarish few months for him,” said Gamarekian, a former New York Times reporter who worked in the White House press office during the Administration of John F. Kennedy. She was hired only last week to represent Smith.

Smith, a 1991 medical school graduate, is accused of raping a Jupiter, Fla., woman in the early hours of March 30, 1991, at the oceanside Kennedy family estate in north Palm Beach. Opening arguments in the case are to begin on Dec. 2, assuming the selection of the six-person jury is completed as planned.

Gamarekian’s comments seemed intended to counter the portrait of Smith painted by prosecutor Moira K. Lasch. Lasch has referred repeatedly to the Kennedys’ wealth and power and spoken bitingly of Sen. Kennedy’s 1969 accident at Chappaquiddick, in which a woman died, and the “well-oiled” Kennedy machine.

Attorneys in the case are under a judicial gag order, but Smith hired Gamarekian to respond to questions that do not concern the details of the legal proceeding.

In response to a question, Gamarekian said she did not know if Smith’s comment about being “broke” suggested he had totally exhausted the inheritance from his late father, New York businessman Stephen Smith. The bills for the defense will include the hiring of physicians, physical evidence specialists, public-opinion pollsters and jury selection experts.

She described how the trial has forced Kennedy family members, who have come from New York, Boston and Washington for the trial, to remain close to the Spanish-style estate at 1095 N. Ocean Blvd.

Gamarekian said that Smith had remarked to her Tuesday that he intended to go for a long jog on the beach because he believed that by Wednesday the presence of reporters around the estate would make such a jaunt impossible.

Now Smith has changed his exercise routine to swimming in the compound pool and working out on an exercise bike, she said.

Smith has been joined at the compound this week by his mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, his sisters Amanda and Kym, an aunt, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, his brother, Stephen, lead defense attorney Roy Black and three jury consultants.

Gamarekian said that Smith, the lawyers and consultants have done their preparatory work for the case at the family estate. She said the mood at the home has been “upbeat,” although punctuated by occasional moments of gallows humor.

Although the jury selection has been filled with discussion of the Kennedy glamour and wealth, Smith, his mother and other family members have appeared in decidedly modest dress. On Friday, Smith appeared for jury selection wearing a brown herringbone jacket, brown trousers and oxford shoes.

The family members have been picked up at the courthouse curb by a well-used green Mercury station wagon, which at one point sputtered and died and could not be immediately restarted.

The complexity of the lawyers’ task in sorting out prospective jurors’ views was evident Friday as the judge and lawyers interviewed four more candidates. Many of the prospects had strongly positive--and strongly negative--feelings about the Kennedy family.

David Thatcher, a government employee, said he recalled warmly the days of President Kennedy’s “Camelot” Administration, and thought that the Kennedy family’s loss of two sons by assassination was more than any family should be forced to bear.

Overall, “the Kennedys have gotten more of a bad rap than they deserve. They certainly got their share of tragic situations,” he said.

Yet he acknowledged that he had “kind of a negative” impression of the senator, owing to what Thatcher said was “the perception of his drinking and womanizing. . . . I hold senators to a higher standard.”

Thatcher said he could not understand reports that Sen. Kennedy had avoided police officers trying to talk to him about the case, or reports that, after a trip to a bar, the senator had wandered around in his house wearing only a blue oxford-cloth shirt. But, he added: “We all have our pants off, periodically.”

Staff writer Don Shannon in Washington contributed to this report.