Why Must We Choose Between Kobe Bryant And The Woman He Assaulted?

Embracing nuance in a world that wants it all to be black and white

In 2003 when a woman whom Kobe Bryant admitted to having sex with sought medical attention for the lacerations around her genitals — “too many to count,” according to her medical exam — along with a bruise on her jaw and neck as well as injuries “consistent with penetrative trauma” she was the one who was vilified and shamed.

Bryant admitted to grabbing her by the neck but said that he’d done that with other sex partners and it had always been fine in the past. She was painted as a liar even in the face of his admissions and apology to her because many believed that they had to take sides. He can’t be both my hero and someone who also sometimes makes bad decisions that hurt others.

In the aftermath of Bryant's tragic death, it seems that we are being asked to choose between him and this woman once again. Why can’t we honor the best parts of Kobe Bryant, while still acknowledging the parts that were problematic?

We like to believe that those we admire could never do anything untoward and that only bad men do bad things, even though every human being is a mix of admirable and less admirable qualities. It’s just simpler to slap either a White Hat or a Black Hat on everyone, particularly in death. And because a dominance hierarchy like the one that we live in is a zero-sum construct, many of us are incredibly uncomfortable with nuance and gray areas. We like to put our heroes on a pedestal and make them two dimensional, denying them their actual humanity.

Meanwhile, the world is mostly made up of nuance and paradox, where more than one thing can be true at a time. Being against rape and sexual assault is not one of those things, however. Every decent human being should be vocally and affirmatively against it, no matter how beloved or powerful the perpetrator and no matter whether he is alive or dead. Overwhelmingly, rape is not committed by a stranger with a gun in a dark alley. Over 90% of the time, it’s committed by someone the woman knows and already has some kind of relationship with.

Rape and sexual assault are societal issues, not women’s issues or feminist issues, as is quite often alleged. We live in a binary world that vilifies victims particularly if they are harmed by famous or powerful men because we don’t know how to treat the situation holistically, with empathy and compassion all around. We don’t know how to deal with nuance.

Our society tends to simplistically believe in White Hats and Black Hats only, and that right there is the problem. All of this “not speaking ill of the dead” is a red-herring to avoid acknowledging it. We speak ill of the dead all of the time. That’s what history books are for. It’s just that we aren’t good in our society at dealing with things that are difficult to grapple with, and this is just one more example, with a platitude ready-made to facilitate it. As Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse pointed out,

As tributes pour in, celebrating Bryant’s life and legacy, I wonder what it would be like right now, to watch the world around you open up in love for the man who hurt you. To hear people tell you that this wasn’t the time to remind the world of your pain, and it may never be that time again.”

How can we become more empathetic if we insist that only evil men do bad things, and thus our heroes must be perfect, and thus we must punish people who want to talk about the ways in which they were not?

In Egyptian mythology, the heart of the deceased was weighed by Anubis in the Hall of Maat, the goddess of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Refusing to metaphorically weigh Kobe Bryant’s heart now that he is dead means that we aren’t really honoring the human being that he was; we’re only honoring his best parts, and in so doing, we are robbing him of his wholeness.

The purpose is not to judge his soul for eternity like Maat, but to take honest stock of the human being that he actually was, not the hero that we want him to be. Taking him down from the pedestal is the kindest thing we could possibly do. To idolize someone else is to turn them into who you want them to be, erasing who they actually are.

At the same time, we are further marginalizing the pain of the woman that he acknowledging hurting, the woman that he apologized to. We are continuing to victimize her and other women like her by glossing over that such incidents ever took place or that they weren’t really important. Telling them to hush because now is not the time robs them of their voice.

As one such victim who was raped by a popular boy who later died commented, it made the assault a permanent fixture in her mind, something that could never be healed, because she didn’t feel that she was allowed to ever talk about it again. Don’t we owe victims better than that?

One in five women will be raped, over 90% of them by men that they know. Research consistently shows that men believe women are more sexually interested in them than women actually are (Levesque et al., 2006; Perrilloux et al., 2012; Treat et al., 2015). In other words, we’ve got some work to do around this subject that is far less about who is bad and who is good, and that is more about how we socialize men and women to interact with each other.

Why do we have to choose just one person to support? Why can’t we take these two people from the characters they have have been painted as in the press to flesh and blood human beings? Both deserve our empathy and caring. Both deserve their humanity. To pit them, and those who have taken a side, against each other in the public eye, is to further dehumanize both them and our society. It’s not a zero-sum game. One of them doesn’t have to lose in order for the other one to win and we shouldn’t have to pick.

I didn’t write this piece, but it’s a very well-done accompaniment to my story.

“The public grief process for those with complicated histories is divisive because we believe people can have wrong feelings & that somehow those incorrect, powerful feelings will erase the rightness of your feelings.”