Four satellite trucks, a dozen camera crews and more than 60 journalists lined up on Friday night in the small square opposite Palm Beach police station, flanked by a memorial to Henry Morrison Flagler, the 19th-century oil baron who built this fabled playground for America’s rich and famous.

“I think I know most of your faces by now,” said Craig Gunkel, the officer who had been fielding press calls since the first reports last week of an alleged rape at the Kennedys’ Palm Beach estate.

“The Palm Beach police department is in a position to officially identify the rape suspect as William Smith, a 30-year-old white male from Washington DC,” he said. “No further information will be released.”

Smith, son of Jean Kennedy Smith and nephew of Senator Edward Kennedy, had already been named as the prime suspect by several newspapers. But Gunkel’s announcement made it official: this was a genuine sex scandal and, once again, one of the celebrated clan was in the frame.

The affair came as manna from heaven for the tabloids as they reconstructed the movements last Saturday night of the 59-year-old senator, his 24-year-old son, Patrick, and his nephew, William Smith, as they did the rounds of Palm Beach bars and nightspots before adjourning with at least one, perhaps two, women to the Kennedy estate.

One local radio station cancelled its regular programming on Friday afternoon to run a call-in special on sex, politics and the Kennedys. “The reality is that the Kennedy family through four generations has been about the horniest bunch that I have ever come across,” said Jack Cole, the show’s host.

Allegations that the Kennedys were being sheltered by police surfaced after a court ruling that officers were not obliged to release further details of the rape complaint by a 29-year-old blonde, a well-off single mother, who met the Kennedys in the Au Bar nightclub last Saturday night.

The tabloid reporters were soon falling back on native cunning. One freelance hired a limousine to go to the hospital where the victim was treated. Posing as a wealthy socialite, she offered to pay the victim’s medical bill. The hospital fell for it and produced the patient’s name and address.

Amid all the hoopla, there are only a few undeniable facts. The three Kennedys were down for a traditional Easter weekend at La Guerida, the Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Atlantic built by Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, in the 1930s.

After visiting a few bars, they ended up at Au Bar, where they were seen talking to two women. At least one of them, the 29-year-old blonde, accompanied at least one of the Kennedys to La Guerida when the club closed at 3am.

Some time after 4am, the blonde left the Kennedy estate and went to hospital, where she was treated for four hours and released. She contacted a rape victims’ support group, and then went to the police.

The New York Post, which has been leading the tabloid pack, has added two salacious details to this bare outline. It reported that the alleged attack took place on a concrete staircase that runs from the Kennedy house to the beach. It also said Ted Kennedy, half naked, was romping round the estate with a second woman while the alleged attack was taking place.

Attention is focusing on whether the so-called “curse of the Kennedys” has struck the younger generation. Certainly the clan, often called America’s royal family, has had its fair share of trouble in recent years, but the curse story has been somewhat overdone. There are 28 Kennedy grandchildren, and most live relatively normal lives.

Nobody is in any doubt, however, that the events of the past week are a disaster for Ted Kennedy and Smith. The senator said on Friday that he was eager to help the police investigation, but comparisons are being made with the Chappaquiddick scandal of 1969, when a young woman drowned after Ted Kennedy, who then saw himself as a future president, crashed his car off a bridge.

The outlook for young Smith, a final-year medical student at Georgetown University, is even bleaker. Friends describe him as a shy type who rarely publicises his Kennedy background; now he is caught up in the family legend whether he likes it or not.

Smith was acquitted. Aged 49, he is now a doctor specialising in the rehabilitation of landmine victims.

Ted Kennedy died in August.

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