When I saw the TMZ story reporting that Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter crash yesterday, my first thought was: Holy fucking shit. Kobe was one of the most globally famous athletes alive, an NBA icon who won multiple championships, provided countless indelible moments for basketball fans, and became synonymous with a standard of success parallel to the one established by Michael Jordan, his stylistic predecessor and the one player he spent his entire career attempting to surpass. He exemplified excellence as grim-jawed killer instinct (murder your opponents on the court), relentless hard work (practice for hours, because the sport demands it), blunt honesty (if your teammates suck, call them out), and beatific monologing about loving the game, which to him was a way of life.
Kobe wasn’t the most dominant player of his generation (Shaquille O’Neal) or the most consistently successful (Tim Duncan) or even the coolest (Allen Iverson). But of all his peers, he turned winning into his brand, even when he wasn’t winning all that much. For this he was rewarded with the undying love of a Los Angeles Lakers fanbase accustomed to winning, which in turn propelled him to a generational stardom that resonated not just with schmucks like you and me, but other generational stars like Tiger Woods and Novak Djokovic, who idolized his dedication and success as they too threw themselves into a line of work that demands dedication in order to achieve success. The reality of his death at 41, along with the death of his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, will remain unreal to me for some time.
My second thought after hearing the news was, regrettably: Twitter is going to be a nightmare. Social media rewards immediacy and earnestness, and in the wake of such a shocking death, my timeline quickly filled up with stunned acknowledgements followed by pained expressions of sorrow and sentiment, especially as misreporting began to fly about who else was on the helicopter (some said retired Laker Rick Fox was aboard and others Kobe’s wife and four daughters, before the reporting settled to just Gianna and the other, less memorialized passengers). Grieving is a messy and complicated process; the collective, real-time, and frequently performative grieving process the internet enables ranged from profound (reflections from reporters about his personality and behavior; heartfelt tributes from friends) to basic (“I’m so sad”) to immensely banal (“I just got to tell a room full of people that Kobe died, and the vibe is weird!”).
But mostly I thought Twitter would be a nightmare because I could immediately forecast the divide between two groups of people: those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done.
The facts are not up for interpretation: On June 30, 2003, at the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera in Eagle, Colorado, Kobe invited a 19-year-old employee of the spa into his room after she’d shown him around the facility. They began kissing consensually, but when he took off his pants, she tried to leave. He then groped her, ignored her multiple requests to leave, choked her hard enough to leave bruises on her neck, physically blocked her from leaving the room, ignored more of her requests to stop, and forcibly penetrated her, only stopping when she aggressively resisted. “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me,” she told police. The day after, a nurse observed the woman and, according to a detective from the sheriff’s office, “stated that the injuries were consistent with penetrating genital trauma. That it’s not consistent with consensual sex.”
The next day, Kobe was questioned by police and admitted to having sex with the woman but stated he thought it was consensual; he also admitted he’d never explicitly asked for consent. After providing DNA evidence, he was formally charged with sexual assault and false imprisonment. Over the next year and a half, his lawyers attacked the accuser’s credibility by pointing out she’d had sex with another man in the week before the alleged assault, that she’d attempted suicide in the past, and that she had been initially excited to meet Kobe. (Her identity was also leaked.) Predictably, NBA fans took his side. I — and almost every other casual basketball observer from that era — can remember multiple conversations about whether Kobe had really done it, most of which concluded that he had not. (A popular line of logic: “Why would someone as famous as Kobe Bryant need to rape someone?”)
Following all of this, the accuser chose not to testify at trial and the criminal charges were dropped, though the two parties later reached an undisclosed settlement in a civil lawsuit. In a statement following the dismissal of the criminal charges, Kobe said: “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 don’t recap this exhaustively to be one of those smarmy people who, in the immediate wake of his death, leapt out of the woodwork to smugly assert “Uh, he was a bad person” to anyone who expresses sadness, but to point out the simple fact that Kobe committed sexual assault — which he literally admitted, in front of the entire country — and any exhaustive recapping of his life should include and reckon with this instead of basically mentioning it as an aside. It won’t be, for multiple reasons: beloved celebrity athletes are forgiven for pretty much anything (unless they’re O.J. Simpson, but even he isn’t that much of a pariah as he is an oddity); rape culture is real (slander about the accuser’s intentions still persist today); it’s very easy to make pat declarations about how life is complicated and how you can do two things (mourn an iconic athlete, recognize he had a non-consensual and violent sexual encounter with a woman) at once, even if that’s typically said by people who are just doing one thing. The gravity of Kobe’s sudden death seems to supersede all other considerations, even as his legacy is immediately cemented by the same people who think we should ignore all that. The understood divide between the personal and the private by which many abide continues to govern the mourning process, even on Twitter.
When every publication seems to be rushing to provide postmortem content, and every individual seems to be rushing to publicly insert themselves into the conversation, neat summary is the best a lot of people are going to do, and a line about admitting to sexual assault rarely fits into that.
It’s this last one that I understand a little more: Kobe did hundreds of conventionally great things by a public standard, insofar as athletes are venerated and celebrated by society, and one conventionally horrible thing by a private standard. In recent years he had, as public figures with deep bank accounts are able to do, completely rehabilitated his image as that of a family man, philanthropist, WNBA booster and even an Oscar winner (in the same year that the Academy claimed to be seriously grappling with Hollywood’s sexual misconduct crisis). Since none of us really knew him anyways, and he seemed like such a great dad and an alright husband (his wife Vanessa stood by him), it was much easier to just sort of… move on, and behave as though it never happened, or as if we had all silently and uniformly agreed that it was bad, yes, but isn’t life complicated, and… uhh he’s done a lot of good so... (trails off into the distance). After all, what’s one maybe-rape measured against 81 points in a game and five championships? What’s the private pain of one anonymous person against the public joy of millions?
For a lot of people, the answer is clear: nothing. It’s just a numbers game. While some writers would invoke philosophers here to point out the falseness of thinking this way, I will concede the reality that the majority of Kobe worshippers are not going to suddenly familiarize themselves with the stark details of a 16-year-old sexual assault case, and suddenly adjust their lifelong perspective of this now-dead person to account. It’s much easier to remember the good times, ignore the bad, and above all post, so your memory, your experience, and your grief can be validated by onlookers.
And sure, life is complicated, and we could all think a little more about forgiveness and the shades of grey and the duality of man or whatever. But allow me to remind you that these calls for tolerance and understanding usually come on behalf of the supremely powerful, those whose reputations are too massive to neatly summarize without some pointed moral concessions. (That’s assuming they come at all: Again, many more are content to simply not care, and actively attack those who point it out.) When every publication seems to be rushing to provide postmortem content, and every individual seems to be rushing to publicly insert themselves into the conversation, neat summary is the best a lot of people are going to do, and a line about rape rarely fits into that. Even declaring that what he did was “rape” — without euphemism — feels callous and shocking, and can easily veer into an elliptical discussion of sexual assault vernacular.
It isn’t just social media and the internet, either: Turn on a TV, open a newspaper, or go outside and you’ll see countless uncomplicated tributes. But I think it is uniquely true that while social media has become a one-way wake after a public person dies, it also allows us to see how crystallized some cultural attitudes are and how obviously some hypocrisies reveal themselves. Which other famous people aren’t going to be so immediately forgiven by the same people shedding tears for Kobe?
Things can change once enough time passes and the dissenters are browbeat into holding their silence. After all, a man died, along with his daughter, and seven others, and if you think now is the time to litigate all the messy stuff that happened so long think again, because my opinion is more important than your opinion. But when I read all these tributes to Kobe, I don’t learn anything about him, because while his death is tragic, he is a person I did not know. Instead, his death teaches me about us.
