Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Kobe and the Rape Case

I never liked Kobe Bryant very much. When he entered the NBA, I didn't care—he wasn't on the Sixers, so who gives a shit—and when the rape accusations came at him several years later, he just seemed like a dick.

At the time, I'm sure he was exactly that. He was newly married and fucking people on the side (which, even consensually, is a dick move). He had just won three championships, yet was busy fighting with Shaq, the other core piece of those teams, despite talking about how many championships he wanted to win and how that was his primary goal. (Yes, Shaq actively partook in the fighting. Fifty percent blame on each side.) Growing up with an unusual amount of worldly experience, living most of his life as a kid outside the U.S., made some people think he had a broader, better view of the world, but he acted exactly like the person he was—a wildly entitled 24-year-old with endless money and fame.

One time, several years after the rape case was dropped, I got into an argument about it with a co-worker. She made the usual defense about him never being convicted; I retorted by pointing out not only the overall rarity of convictions, but the fact that the case was only dropped because the victim declined to testify (in part due to death threats from Kobe's fans), and that part of the deal for her to not testify required that he release a statement which effectively confessed to the crime, however covered in lawyer speak it may have been.

My co-worker said the victim was lying. That was the end of the conversation.

For the record, this is his statement, in full:

First, I want to apologize directly to the young woman involved in this incident. I want to apologize to her for my behavior that night and for the consequences she has suffered in the past year. Although this year has been incredibly difficult for me personally, I can only imagine the pain she has had to endure. I also want to apologize to her parents and family members, and to my family and friends and supporters, and to the citizens of Eagle, Colorado.
I also want to make it clear that I do not question the motives of this young woman. No money has been paid to this woman. She has agreed that this statement will not be used against me in the civil case. Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.
I issue this statement today fully aware that while one part of this case ends today, another remains. I understand that the civil case against me will go forward. That part of this case will be decided by and between the parties directly involved in the incident and will no longer be a financial or emotional drain on the citizens of the state of Colorado.

(Emphasis mine.)

That's rape. There's no grey area here. She didn't consent, and the statement acknowledges she didn't consent.

I understand some people will defend this by saying it was just a statement to get the case off his back. That's not irrational. A mea culpa, even for something as bad as this, even if the odds of conviction are a single-digit percentage (and the prosecutors seemed to have a much better chance than that), is a small price to pay to definitively avoid a prison sentence at the height of one's NBA superstardom.

Consider the whole situation, however. A young superstar who can have basically anything he wants in the world invites a young woman to his room, and kissing, at the very least, happens consensually. There's no question he's been in this situation numerous times, and the women involved in the vast majority of those circumstances unquestionably want to fuck him. You might not believe Kobe Bryant is, or ever was, the kind of person who would consciously do whatever he wanted to a woman, regardless of her wishes, and that might be true. But it's hardly a stretch to imagine him thinking he does know her wishes, because of course she wants the same thing as everyone else who joins him in his room.

Anyway, why am I rehashing all of this? If you think he committed rape, I don't need to convince you. If you don't, this is unlikely to sway you. Maybe this helps a few people who know little or nothing about the case, but that won't be many on a blog so small, Google can hardly find it.

The reason is that Kobe's case, more than any other like it, is about the culture around the man more than the man himself.

We look Weinstein or Cosby, or that ludicrous doctor placed in charge of women's gymnastics for decades, and even though it required total institutional failures for them to commit serial assault, we point to the men in those cases as being godawful humans. Once the extent of their crimes became apparent, and we decided this shit could (finally) not be allowed to stand, the hammer came down on them quickly. Questions about fixing the relevant institutions exist, but those answers are much slower in coming.

As the #metoo movement has progressed, we've started taking accusations as a whole more seriously. Anyone who's accused of inappropriate conduct by multiple people usually catches backlash in a way that would have been shocking fifteen years ago. Because those less egregious cases often don't require institutional cover or willful ignorance, we can point at the men and not worry about the broader structures around them. In cases where the institutions do come into play—such as cases where the women around an individual were warned to be careful near him—we still point towards the man, and the larger questions of how this was allowed to go on get hand-waved away.

Likewise, Kobe's rape case ended up being about Kobe and Kobe alone, but that's done all of us a disservice. Consider:

  1. If ever there were a case, especially a high-profile one, where rape could have been committed out of ignorance of a partner's wishes, this is it. Saying, "Oh, he didn't know," sounds like an excuse, so it makes sense why those who thought Kobe was guilty might not want to acknowledge this possibility. Likewise, anyone who was sure of his innocence could not even contemplate this, because it opens the door for guilt.

    The problem is that by not acknowledging this, it removes the possibility of putting forth the critical point that ignorance is no excuse. If Person A thinks he's having consensual sex and Person B entirely disagrees, Person B is no less raped because Person A's mindset isn't what we think of as that of a rapist.

  2. Related to #1: one not-rare complaint among men (and some women) is that it's too easy for someone to make a false rape claim. Let's set aside the numbers that say how unusual false claims are, or that calling such claims "easy" ignores the experience of making such a claim for myriad women.

    If Kobe's case were held up as the primary example of why you need to know what your partner wants, we could have started normalizing conversation and communication as a healthy part of consensual sex years ago. I think we're improving in this regard, however slowly, but imagine the effect of an argument like this: "Yeah, I get that you're sure she's into you, but do you want to end up like Kobe?"

    This doesn't cover concerns some guys have about a partner who openly consents and then flat-out lies about it later, but if they're that scared of everyone, they can stay home and jack off.

  3. Kobe's celebrity status saved him in a way that nothing he directly possessed could. Even though his lawyers savaged the victim in a way that causes many in the same position to drop their cases, she persisted. It took death threats and the approach of the trial itself—the time when those threats were most likely to become real, especially if she got Kobe convicted—for her to get cold feet.

    I would like to link directly to a story about this—they definitely existed—but at the time of writing, all searches related to death threats focused on Kobe's rape case involve Felicia Somnez, a reporter for the Washington Post who mentioned the case in a tweet after his death.

    Then again, if reporters are being threatened for mentioning the case, the idea the person who could have had Kobe locked up wasn't getting absolutely bombarded with them is ludicrous.

  4. The lack of justice will permanently stain his legacy in a way that may not have happened with actual punishment. 
Now, mind you, in no way am I suggesting that if Kobe did time for this, things would have worked out better for him in the long run. He would have lost prime years of his career and come back needing to both reach his previous level as a player, and make clear amends as a person, to get anywhere near his old level of stardom. No matter the facts of the case that we have, the lack of a conviction clears his name in the eyes of many, if not most.

But let's look at the best counter-example we have: Mike Tyson. Tyson was one of the few athletes to exist on Kobe's level of stardom. Tyson was also accused of rape. Unlike Kobe, he was convicted and did three years in prison. A lot of people didn't like Tyson, and he had started on the downslope of his athletic career, so it didn't impact the sport as much as Kobe doing time would have, but it was still a huge deal.

In the years since then, Tyson has reformed himself and his image. He still lives a public life, he's in movies, and people who interact with him describe a generally good guy. Some won't forgive his crime, of course, but the fact he served a punishment for it has made it acceptable for others to like him again. 

To put this in context: In 2018, fifteen years after the case against Kobe was dropped, he was removed from the jury at a film festival due to protests against him as an "accused rapist and sexual predator". These kinds of protests and movements pop up around people like Kobe because those who take seriously justice for assault victims, and the lack of justice for offenders, see him as someone who they need to push back against because society didn't do it when he committed his crime.

Would the same protest have existed had he been convicted? Maybe. But the only group that's protested anything Tyson has done in the last several years is PETA, and that was over pigeon racing. There certainly have been opportunities for groups of concerned citizens to ask or demand that he be removed from things, but it hasn't happened. Do you think that would be the case if there were lingering ill-feelings stemming from a rape accusation with clear evidence of guilt but a lack of punishment for him?

What makes this unfortunate in retrospect is that Kobe turned into a pretty good guy, by all accounts. It's not that millions are wounded by the loss of a hero who only existed on TV and posters; it's all the people close to him who are pouring their hearts out about what a loss this is for them and for the world. As Will Leitch points out, Kobe's career can be divided pretty cleanly between pre-Colorado and post-Colorado. He did what we all hope someone who fucks up and gets away with it does—he learned and became a better person. He never got in serious trouble again, and he became someone who used his incredible stardom to improve the world around him, something which almost certainly would have continued had he lived to sixty or eighty or one hundred.

If he had been punished in a real way for the rape—which probably would have meant jail time—his NBA career would have unquestionably suffered to some degree. But there's likewise no question he would have found a team to play for upon release, be it the Lakers or someone else, and his famed competitiveness would have almost certainly made him a star again. The conviction would have been a black mark on his career, of course, but if he could change his ways from a near-miss, he probably would have done the same after returning from prison. He would have still been an All-Star, still internationally famous, still a better person after the incident than he was before, and we could have all looked upon the new Kobe with a clean slate, his atonement complete.

Instead of most of the world enjoying Kobe Bryant, the NBA star, and praising Kobe Bryant, the man he became, we all could have done so. No dark clouds, no unfinished penalties hanging over him. But we didn't have that chance, and the world was worse for it before his death, just like the world is worse for his loss now.

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