From the New York Times preview of Ted Kennedy’s memoir:

Mr. Kennedy expressed regret over the 1991 episode in Palm Beach, when he went drinking with his son Patrick and his nephew William K. Smith, who would be charged with rape that allegedly occurred that night. (Mr. Smith was later acquitted.)
Those events hobbled him later that year when Clarence Thomas was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. Mr. Kennedy strongly opposed the nomination, but, he wrote, he could not speak out as forcefully as he would have liked. He understood, he wrote, a “hard truth: with all the background noise about Palm Beach and my bachelor lifestyle, I would have been the wrong person” to raise questions about Mr. Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita F. Hill.