Was waiting for you to jump in, agreed on all points.
Happy to be an amateur.
It’s hard to believe she refused his offer of a pearl necklace but a good strangling was welcomed. Possible, but hard to believe.
We just need to put that outcome into the probability tree since we just cant say for sure.
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Yeah this is a really good point wrt choking. Also the only times I’ve encountered it, it was 100% the woman’s kink. Not sure how I feel about a dude doing it for himself weirdly. Maybe it’s because for me it’s one of those ‘if it gets her off’ type of deals. Seems like there are literally dozens of safer ways to be dominant in bed as a guy if that’s what you’re into.
It’s been such a long time since the Kobe rape trial now that I honestly can’t recall the details, so I’m not going to get into the weeds about how credible the accusations were. I think that it’s probably relevant that there were never any other accusations (that I’m aware of) though. I’m very much a believer in the idea that celebrity rapists have the means and opportunity to become serial rapists, and as a result usually do. Usually when these guys get accused there are multiple victims who instantly come out of the woodwork for this reason. This allows me to give cuse, if not Kobe himself, a pass here for not being fully sold on the ‘Kobe is a rapist’ story.
Isn’t it the case that most rapists, not only celebrities, become serial rapists, like crossing a threshold that can’t be uncrossed?
That’s probably true. But it’s also true that being rich, famous, and powerful exponentially increases the opportunities to rape. A lot of rapists are opportunistic predators who take the opportunities to rape that come up basically. If that’s the kind of person you are the number of opportunities is going to chart very closely to the number of victims. Someone like an NBA legend would have had a LOT of opportunities over the years.
I think pretty much every person who was ever falsely accused of rape was only accused by one person lol (getting to the point where you’ve actually been accused publicly is a pretty high bar given how many victims don’t come forward). I think that’s probably a pretty accurate statement. There are psychopaths and people with borderline personality disorder of both genders which means it’ll never be zero men falsely accused of rape… but it’s a hell of a lot fewer than the mens rights nut cases would have you believe.
Further I think the majority of false rape accusations also fit a pattern: the accused is a minority that will struggle to defend themselves (lots of poor black/brown men) and less commonly because the police are actively looking for this (and often it works and goes away) extortion attempts on men who can pay. These are obviously the really clear cut cases as opposed to the grey messes where it’s very likely just a horrific misunderstanding. Again in the interest of giving cuse a pass Kobe was a minority, able to pay, and only accused once… all of which points to a grey mess or better at least a decent % of the time. We’ll truly never know and it’s extremely possible he raped that woman unfortunately.
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There are multiple accusers on Kav, and Trump. Also both are privileged white guys who grew up filthy rich. Just saying.
At the same time I 1000% agree that the percentages are not skewed in Kobe’s favor. I just don’t agree that it’s incredibly unlikely that he was at least mostly innocent of rape.
This is the wrong way to look at it.
Your position that when one person accuses a celebrity there tends to be a rash of subsequent accusations is rife with confirmation bias.
I think this is especially true for a celebrity like Kobe. He’s not a typical famous person. He’s adored by Lakers fans in a way distinct from how actors’ and especially politicians’ fans like them.
It’s also especially true given the way Kobe’s accuser was besmirched. Who else would come forward after that??
Initially read that as “Klobes” and was all, OK, that’s tough but fair.
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Nothing to disagree with there. And I’ll happily admit that I probably over weight the possibility that any given woman is just a straight up evil creature because of personal life experiences growing up. No I wasn’t accused of anything, but I’ve watched some pretty sociopathic behavior get carried out by my mother… and my MIL is a serial false reporter on domestic violence. Women being fucking awful isn’t as rare as I think some of you think it is… which is itself a form of sexism IMO. Automatically believing things because a woman said it (or anyone said it for that matter) is a real life leak IME.
Virtually any time someone wants to automatically believe absolutely anything anyone says (without a great body language read I can see myself, a story that fits together perfectly, etc) I immediately want to slow way way down and verify. That’s because I know that big stories where you’d be a monster to question someone are where people with personality disorders LOVE to start. ‘My kid went missing I think someone took them’ usually means ‘I killed my kid’ when they don’t find the kid semi quickly… and the default defense of a normal person if questioned about why/where/how their kid went missing in any kind of questioning tone can be defended with ‘you monster how dare you accuse me of murdering my own child’. And so it goes. The more out there the story the more likely it is to be false.
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Yeah rape sucks. Getting raped sucks. You’re describing pretty perfectly why everyone involved in a rape investigation should be anonymous until a sentence is handed down, and after that it should be the womans choice whether she wants to go public about it and have her name released.
It would raise the rate of reporting for sure. The people who get hurt the most by our incredibly dysfunctional system for dealing with sex crimes are the victims AINEC. It should be illegal to print their names in the press without their written permission.
This is extra true when you’re talking about accusing someone famous of course. It would also discourage the attention seeking crazies (full blown narcicisstic personality disorders like Trump give zero fucks about the fact that the vast amounts of attention they are getting is negative) from falsely accusing anyone… which would eliminate like 90% of my doubt about accusations aimed at celebrities.
Criminal justice shouldn’t be a public spectacle at all frankly. Absolutely no one benefits from it being one except for publicly elected prosecutors, defense attorneys, and people with raging personality disorders.
Holy shit what is happening in this thread!
- Bitches be lyin’
- Believe survivors
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You probably should if you’re going to continue on the path you’re on. I mean, you should probably stop posting in this thread, but if you’re not going to do that…
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I’ll bet very few can accurately recall the details of Kobe’s rape trial.
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I mean we already have anonymity for minor victims in the criminal justice system. Seems like it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to extend it. Women shouldn’t have to get publicly shamed to get justice… which is what happens under the current system.
I’m going to step on the 3rd rail here, and then probably unsubscribe.
No one itt knows how they would behave if they were very quickly thrust into the role of earth royalty in your late teens/early 20s - with people fawning all over your every word and (in some cases) women throwing themselves at you constantly.
In no way does that excuse forcing yourself on someone when a consensual situation didn’t go as far as you think your godlike status should command. Every punishment should be meted out and Kobe almost certainly got off way too easy. Unless she was basically lying the whole time - which seems impossible - he should have had jail time.
However for me anyway, when you look at the body of work in the 17 years since - all the work he put in for women’s and girl’s basketball and being a model father - all the other stories that are coming out now about him visiting sick kids and asking how he could help, but demanding no PR - the optimistic side of me wants to think the guy had some kind of come to Jesus moment and worked to be the best person he possibly could the rest of his life.
I saw some study that people share no more personality traits with themselves from 10-20 years prior than they do with a random person. People do change. I was a sociopath in my teens and I think most are. I just wasn’t particularly motivated to do heinous things. But I had zero empathy if they happened to someone else. Unless I literally saw them suffering - and then my empathy would go to 100 instantly. I think a lot of younger people, especially young men, are like that.
Now imagine instant worldwide fame when you’re 19. I shudder to think the asshole I would have been. My growth as a human being absolutely would have ended for a while until I finally got knocked down a few pegs.
Anyway like I said - the optimist in me wants to think the guy did everything he could to be a good person for the last 10-15 years of his life. Maybe I’m just a polyanna. And for the record I’ve always hated the Lakers and was never a Kobe fan when he played. So this isn’t just delusional fanboy.
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Where’s the option for, “Both of the above”? 
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I’ve taken a day off the internet to cool off because I’ve been going pretty hard on this on multiple platforms.
In the past, you’ve claimed that when I explicitly said I was not advocating for violence that you “knew” what I really meant.
If I misread your intention, then I apologize.
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“Too soon” is the thing everyone says. It’s hard, though, because I would get attacked the same way when I brought it up when he was alive. So there was never a “right time” to talk about it. Because I wrote this piece back in 2016, people have been reaching out to me over the past 24 hours. It’s the very angry and the very ugly, but it’s also a lot of survivors who are having very complicated feelings, and are really upset that they’re not hearing it talked about and want to know if there’s something wrong with them because it’s all they can think about.
Part of the legacy of that rape case was the extreme victim-shaming that Kobe’s lawyer did, and that the media ran with. The law didn’t protect her, the legal system didn’t protect her, and the media certainly didn’t protect her. And so a lot of people do remember that, and remember him never, never reckoning with that. Him still enforcing the nondisclosure agreement—a couple of years ago he did an interview with the Washington Post, a big feature, and they reached out to her and she couldn’t talk because of the NDA.
And that’s important. That impacted a lot of people too, as did, of course, his work in women’s basketball, and his relationship with his daughter. It all exists. And it’s uncomfortable that it all exists, but it does. And ignoring it doesn’t help. I think ignoring it just makes survivors from all communities feel more shame, feel more confused, and feel like they’re not a part of our culture, our society.
Rapists feel more emboldened when rape goes unpunished. Rape victims become less likely to report rape when rape goes unpunished.
With Kobe, we had someone who was rich and powerful and famous who had a strong case against him, where he didn’t need to be caught in the act and he didn’t have to be caught in video and he didn’t need to leave her a bloody mess and he didn’t have a multitude of accusers. And he paid millions to pull the rug out from all of that, when he should have spent a few years in prison.
Kobe’s legacy of rape is all the rapists who felt they could get away with it and all the victims who thought their abusers would get away with it. It’s his validation of the victim-blaming playbook used by his attorneys.
Ultimately, I look at Kobe rape apologists in the same way that I look at Trump apologists.
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