Bryant’s death was one of those moments that seemed to stop the world in disbelief. Tributes poured in attesting to how much he meant to basketball, to Los Angeles, to black Gen Xers and millennials who came of age with him and watching him. People shared video clips of his cameos on Sister, Sister, rode waves of nostalgia by chucking wadded-up balls of paper at the trash, yelling “KOBE!” They eulogized him as a father and advocate for women’s basketball, the devastation of those losses compounded by the fact that Gianna Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, died in the helicopter crash alongside him.
And in what felt like a parallel conversation, there was a remembrance of Bryant as he existed for so many others: another man who hurt a woman and moved on, untouched. They remembered the 19-year-old woman who said that Bryant blocked her from leaving a hotel room in 2003, groped and choked her, then raped her. They recalled the subsequent trial and coverage, how his accuser’s name was leaked to the press while her sexual history and mental health were dissected.
Quickly though, these stories began to collide. As the posthumous hagiography machine began to whirl, there were familiar conversations about respect, legacies, mythmaking, and the “right time” to bring up sexual assault. Obituaries hinted at a “complicated” legacy or made oblique references to “Colorado.” There were mentions of the rape case, maybe, in a quick and tidy paragraph. Anything more would have made the narrative incoherent. Uncomfortable. Distasteful.
The story of Bryant’s life had been written over the course of decades, largely along the same parallel lines. As with so many other powerful men, it was rare to see these two things—beloved men and the harm they’ve done—held in tension for very long. So this ended up being a story about Kobe Bryant and a story about us. How we compartmentalize the people we love or admire. How we don’t know how to talk about sexual violence, and cling to myths about “monsters” and “good guys.” How victims so quickly fade from public view, while the men who victimized them rise in status. We can hardly talk about the strange pain of knowing someone in these ways—a loving father, a supernaturally talented athlete, and an alleged rapist—in life. Why should it be different in death?
Survivors are not a monolith, but for many, the rape case and its reverberations are still incredibly painful. By the time Bryant called a news conference, sitting next to his wife and publicly contesting the charges, the case had already become a national spectacle. It played on historically dangerous stereotypes of black men raping white women and perpetuated harmful ideas about false rape accusations. Ultimately, the woman decided not to testify in the criminal trial, and prosecutors dropped the case. Bryant and the woman would eventually settle a civil case out of court.
This is when we were told to move on. When Bryant retired from basketball, it was seen as “not the time” to talk about the rape case because it was a moment of celebration. It would never actually become the right time, which is a lesson you will learn repeatedly when trying to talk about sexual violence. And so the force of Bryant’s celebrity was relatively unchanged, just usually marked with an asterisk. He was the star you knew, on ESPN, in GQ, on Showtime, but there was also that other thing—a matter to be addressed and quickly moved past.
It can be hard to imagine what better would have looked like. We live in a carceral state that routinely disposes of people, locking them away and calling it justice. So it’s difficult to conceive of atonement outside of carcerality, both from the people who have hurt others and from the media and other ecosystems trying to make sense of them. Restorative justice seeks to bring those who have harmed and those affected by the harm—including the victim, their families, and their larger communities—into conversation with each other, creating processes to rebuild and heal. But these are often smaller, community-led efforts. Victims in high-profile cases often don’t know what to ask for in terms of healing because there is no real map to follow. What does an amends—a public amends—look like at this kind of scale?