Key words: from her perspective.
So in my exact example, one person says “Don’t! Stop!” and the other person thinks they said “Don’t stop!” now you have a miscommunication that leads to her believing she was raped and him believing she was telling him to keep going. I don’t know what the law says about that exact scenario, but morally I’m certainly going to be more judgmental of someone who does it on purpose than of someone who thought they were being encouraged to keep going, whose transgression was not stopping to clarify.
If you can’t see a difference between those two acts, I don’t know what to tell you.
The bottom line is that in the Kobe case we don’t know exactly what happened, and we don’t know exactly how things were worded. Thus, it’s possible that there was a miscommunication and that his apology acknowledged it and apologized for it and acknowledged that she experienced something terrible. It’s also possible he’s an asshole who raped her and bought his way out of it. Those are the two likely scenarios, and there are a couple of very unlikely scenarios as well. We will likely never know exactly what happened, and should evaluate his character in that light.