Kobe and Gigi Bryant Memorial Thread (RIP)

Yayo Toure

Yayo Toure

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DIO Brando said:
Don't know if it was posted but this story is wild especially the ending.

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Skooby said:
Kobe Bryant was no rapist

Kobe Bryant was no rapist
By Andrea Peyser
February 10, 2020 | 12:42pm

kobe.jpg

Kobe BryantGetty Images
Kobe Bryant, star athlete, adored husband, beloved superdad, was no rapist. That should be the end of it. Nothing to see here. Sadly, in this #MeToo era, it isn’t.

So many people who don’t know what they’re talking about have been mewling lately about the “tarnished legacy’’ of the NBA superstar, who died tragically in a helicopter crash along with his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven other people on Jan. 26.

Leading the pack was CBS broadcaster Gayle King, who pointedly asked former women’s basketball player Lisa Leslie in an interview if being loyal to Bryant is “complicated for you as a woman, as a WNBA player?”

Leslie told King forcefully that it was not. “I just never, have ever seen him being the kind of person that would do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way,’’ she said.

But King pressed on, suggesting that Leslie may have overlooked questionable behavior because she was Bryant’s friend. She should have let it go.

Instead, King and others in the media continued harping on a long-ago sexual assault allegation against Bryant, which led to no prosecution, no professional penalty and no divorce.

I attended the case’s 2003 preliminary hearing in Eagle, Colorado — a kind of mini-trial to determine if there is to be a real one. I traveled to the altitude sickness-inducing town 6,000 feet above sea level expecting to see Bryant presented as a spoiled testosterone case who didn’t understand the meaning of “no.”

What I found was quite different.

It makes little sense to re-litigate this ugly chapter, but circumstances are making this necessary. At the time she encountered Bryant in the hotel in which she worked, on June 30, 2003, the accuser was 19. Bryant was all of 24, and the married father of an infant.


Kobe Bryant with wife VanessaGetty Images
Soon, we learned more details about the pair’s sexual liaison than we wanted to know. The defense brought up the fact that the accuser had told a friend, excitedly, before getting close to Bryant that she expected the celeb to “put the moves” on her.

She secretly entered Bryant’s hotel room through a back door — so no one would see.

None of this precludes the possibility of sexual assault. However, among the intimate details to emerge in the preliminary hearing was this: Once the pair were having sex — over the back of a chair — the victim felt pain and asked Bryant to stop. And he did.

I don’t know what happened to make the young woman suddenly feel like a victim. Or why, after the case was prepared, she abruptly ended her cooperation with the prosecution. The criminal case against Kobe Bryant was dropped.

He then publicly apologized to the accuser. Not for a rape, but for a misunderstanding.

He concluded with, “Although I truly believe this encounter was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. . . . I now understand she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”

I think the hoops star’s apology amounted to a classy way to end this mess. That, and the undisclosed sum he paid the woman to prevent a civil suit.

As I see it, this matter was between Bryant and his wife. And she forgave him (reportedly after he presented her with a large diamond).

They remained married and had three more daughters, including basketball-loving Gianna — Gigi — who died with her dad. I would hope we could put this sordid chapter behind us, and remember Kobe Bryant as the good, loyal man he was.

Let the dead rest in peace.
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This is real journalism.
 
Swagnificent

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Trece said:
I remember the trial brehs..

I followed it closely.. I remember the prosecutor Mark Hulbert from Eagle Colorado rushing this trash ass indictment to make a name for himself. I remember prosecutors from major cities saying they would have never brought this to trial. I remember Kobes attorney Pamela Mackey -who was described as a pitbull in a skirt-stun the courtroom in opening by revealing that the accuser was walking around with a whole sport team semen in her panties.
I remember the prosecution and even police hedging because they expected Kobe to pay off the accuser but he was stubborn and displaying some mamba mentality when he said he wasn't gonna give her a penny.
The cops were sloppy on this and leaked evidence and abused power by releasing some.of his statements. The whole town of Vail Colorado seemed racist AF.

I always felt like there was a residual Emmet Till whistling at a white woman type vibe to the entire scandal and to make it worse white sports writers held this over Kobe and his legacy and used it to slight him in everything from MVP awards to all time rankings..
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Exactly right. I always said that case was more about racial injustice than sexual assault.
 
Rufus Dufus

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Good LA Times article from 2004 exposing the accuser.

Woman Changed Part of Story
Woman Changed Part of Story
By Steve Henson
Oct. 9, 2004
12 AM
Times Staff Writer
EAGLE, Colo. —
Kobe Bryant’s accuser sent a letter to prosecutors one month before trial was to begin, retracting portions of her original statements to investigators.

The letter was one of several pieces of evidence released by the Eagle County District Attorney’s office Friday that could have been damaging to the 20-year-old woman at the Laker star’s sexual assault trial.

The felony sexual assault charge against Bryant was dismissed Sept. 1 after the accuser decided not to testify. The woman still has a federal suit pending against Bryant seeking unspecified damages.

The accuser wrote in the three-page, handwritten letter dated July 31, 2004, that she needed to inform prosecutors of “a few things that have been weighing heavily on my conscience.”


She said that contrary to her original statement to Det. Doug Winters, Bryant did not make her wash her face following their encounter in a hotel room June 30, 2003. She also said that car trouble was not the reason she had been late to work that day, that actually she had overslept.

Although the contradictions do not directly address her allegation that Bryant forced her to have intercourse by holding her by the neck and ignoring her pleas for him to stop, legal experts said it would have posed problems at trial.

“This isn’t her changing the recollection of a detail, this is her completely inventing something,” said Larry Pozner, a Denver attorney who followed the case closely. Bryant attorney “Pam Mackey would have done a tap dance on her head with that. It’s like gift wrapping a baseball bat and saying, ‘Whack me with it.’ ”

The woman called her mother the morning after the encounter and said, “Mom, I was raped last night,” according to a statement the mother gave an investigator. Asked about her daughter’s truthfulness, the mother said, “She is honest with me about the important things. She is a normal teenager.”


Two witnesses who observed the woman the night of the alleged rape said she did not seemed troubled.

Trina McKay, the woman’s supervisor, said that after emerging from Bryant’s room and returning to her post to count a cash drawer, the woman “had a big smile on her face and was bubbly.” McKay said the woman approached her and said, “Hey, I’m out of here.”

McKay also said Bryant could not sleep late that night and spent a half-hour watching television with her in the lobby.

Another witness said that early in the evening the woman was “flirtatious” with Bryant and described her behavior “as what she might see in a bar.” Janet Woods, a guest at the Cordillera Lodge & Spa, told a prosecution investigator that she thought the woman was someone “intimately” connected with Bryant because of their “body language.”

The woman took a trip to Canada with a friend about one month after the alleged rape and people she met there took photos of her dancing with a man and kissing him at a bar. The photos were sold to a tabloid, and in an interview with a prosecution investigator, one of the woman’s acquaintances said the woman “was hurt by the photos, but as they talked that evening she just kind of laughed it off and said she wanted money for the photos too.”

The acquaintance, Kylie Robinson, said she did not feel the woman was the victim of a sexual assault because “she seemed to make a joke of it and commented about money she was going to get from the trial.”

The woman was in Calgary the night Bryant appeared on the Teen Choice Awards and she became emotionally upset and went to the bathroom, Robinson said.

John Clune, an attorney for the accuser, said he supported the release of the previously sealed files. “It’s better for the public to have as much truth as possible instead of the leak-fest Bryant’s defense attorneys have been running,” he said.

Only 625 pages of approximately 4,000 pages of sealed documents in the file of Eagle County Dist. Atty. Mark Hurlbert were released. Among the material not released was test results of physical evidence in the case, including DNA, clothing and hair and fibers taken from Bryant and the accuser.

In a motion filed Sept. 27, Mackey requested that Hurlbert release 16 items of evidence that favored Bryant. Among the items she requested that remain under seal are the results of the investigation into the purchase of T-shirts degrading to Bryant; a follow-up interview with the accuser that addressed her psychiatric history; and a chart developed by the prosecution concerning allegations of specific sexual conduct.

Also remaining sealed are the opinions of forensics expert Dr. Michael Baden and Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA expert Yvonne Woods. Neither expert would back prosecution theories regarding the transfer of semen from the accuser’s underwear to her body.

A CBI spokesman told prosecutors he had been “misquoted” in a March story in The Times where he indicated such a transfer was “highly unlikely.” Woods, however, made the same comment during a pretrial hearing in June.

One consequence of the allegation was the demotion of Bryant bodyguard Troy Laster at his regular job with the Los Angeles Police Department. Laster, who stood by while detectives interrogated Bryant for 75 minutes the day after the alleged rape, was a member of a squad that investigated assaults.

Ray Birch, an investigator for the prosecution, asked him, “Are you still in that position now?” Laster replied, “No, sir. I’m on the filing team.”
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