Nine people were on the helicopter that crashed outside the wealthy enclave of Calabasas, California, on Sunday. The wreckage of the aircraft scattered across an area the size of a football field, and a day later the LA coroner’s office was still gathering remains from the site. The helicopter had reportedly taken off in dense fog en route to a girls’ basketball tournament in nearby Thousand Oaks, California, where some of the passengers were set to compete: among those on board was 13-year-old Gianna Bryant, an aspiring basketball player. The helicopter belonged to her father, the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, who was also on board, and reportedly it was decked out like a limousine, with a cavernous interior and soft leather seats. There were no survivors.
The death of Kobe Bryant has shocked sports fans and observers in part because he seemed like the sort of person who could never die. On the court, he moved with an uncommon skillfulness and grace, moving the ball from his opponents’ reach with the alacrity and sleight of hand of a magician, leaping into the air with the elegant reach of a ballerina. Though he had a thin jaw and hollow cheeks, his face had something boyish about it. Maybe it was because he had rocketed to fame as a teenager, recruited to the NBA straight out of high school. Or maybe it was the dimple that appeared when he smiled, which he did often and easily. With his alarming physical skill and his aura of joyfulness and minor arrogance, he seemed to possess a permanent and transcendent youthfulness, as if he was always going to be a teenager. In reality, he was old for an athlete when he retired in 2016. He died at 41.
Obituaries and hagiographies for Bryant rolled in the hours following the crash, and most of them focused on the parts of the story that were easiest to understand; tragedy of his sudden death, the beauty of his athletic skill, now lost forever. They carefully and conspicuously elided one of the most significant episodes of Bryant’s public life: that in 2003, a woman said that he raped her in his room at the Colorado hotel where she worked as a concierge. She was strikingly young, too: at the time she says he raped her, the woman was just 19.
The rape accusation defined Bryant’s career during the mid-aughts. First, it was the subject of a criminal trial, in which it was revealed that Bryant had first denied having any contact with the accuser, then changed his story when confronted with evidence by the police – evidence such as the bruise on her neck, consistent with her claim that Bryant had choked her, as well as the tears and bruises on her genitals, his semen inside her, and her blood on his shirt. During the criminal proceedings, the media and Bryant’s legal team used the accuser’s real name repeatedly, and dragged out lurid details of her sexual and psychiatric history as evidence that she couldn’t be trusted. She was hounded by the media, smeared as slutty and crazy in print, and threatened by fans. Eventually, she stopped cooperating with the investigation. This could be because she made the whole thing up, and realized that she made a mistake. That is possible. It is also possible, and more likely, that she stopped cooperating because she was 19, terrified, and facing the full force of media hostility and the legal resources of a very rich, globally popular man.
The criminal case was dropped and the accuser filed a civil suit, which Bryant settled in 2005. The payout is confidential, but was rumored to be about $2.5m. Bryant’s reputation recovered, the episode behind him, and he regained sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Nike. He soon signed a seven-year contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, worth $136m. He bought his wife a comically gigantic diamond ring, seemingly to apologize.
Now that Bryant is dead, it is likely that for his accuser, the traumas of the trial and media attention will be reproduced in miniature. She might be hounded online, or asked for comment by reporters. She might receive threats. At the very least, she will be reminded of what were probably the worst months of her life. For her, we can wish security and peacefulness and loving, supportive surroundings in what is likely a more complicated and distressing time for her than we can imagine. We can wish her safety, and privacy.
But to those mourning for Bryant as they remembered him – as an athlete, or a philanthropist, or as an avatar of youthfulness, skill and success – these wishes can seem very inconvenient, even insulting to their grief. In the hours after Bryant’s death, any mention of the rape accusation on social media was met with derision, contempt or calls not to speak ill of the dead. There is a sense that the alleged rape is minor compared with the rest of Bryant’s legacy, that the pain of his young accuser is irrelevant, and should not be debited from Bryant’s moral account. This chorus has put feminists in the position of making the assertion that rape is more morally significant than basketball.
At the same time, it is difficult not to sympathize with those who are grieving Bryant, those fans for whom he inspired envy and awe. To some of them, the rape accusation might be unbelievable, an anecdote that does not temper or complicate their grief but rather intensifies it: they may see him as a victim of a lie, a vengeful and possibly racist one. Others, more darkly, might believe the accusation but think that it reflects well on Bryant, seeing sexual violence not as a betrayal of the hope that he symbolized but as a sign of the youthfulness and masculine vitality that he displayed with such beauty on the court. There are people – men, mostly – who think of rape this way: not as a brutal violation of a woman but as a signal of a man’s liveliness.
But the reality is that most of those who are grieving Bryant are simply not thinking about his accuser very much at all. That something happened between them is all most of us will ever know about her, but it is just one of scores of things we know about him.
For my part, I find myself thinking less about Bryant than about his young daughter, Gianna, who died with him in the crash. Those who wanted to believe in the better vision of Bryant noted that he was taking her to her own basketball tournament. This, they implied, was a sign that he could not be a misogynist, or a rapist, because he was choosing to spend time with his daughter, choosing to invest in her talent, her ambition. It is hard to accept that this Bryant, this version of him as a kindly father spending time with a young girl, could coexist within the same man who put his hands around the neck of a woman not much older than that daughter, and squeezed. That both of these people could potentially live inside one body – the attentive father, the allegedly violent rapist – is the great mystery and contradiction of Kobe Bryant’s life.
Gianna was 13 when she died, a year that is euphemistically referred to as a “tender age”. It’s tender in part because 13 is around the age when girls become aware of the role that they are ageing into, aware of the injustices, indignities, violences and double standards that will be imposed on them when they are women, because they are women. By 13, you grow breasts and start getting catcalled; it becomes clear that some men will express their desire for you along with resentment and malice. For Gianna, a black girl growing into a black woman, the injustices and indignities she was facing down were even greater and crueler. Every woman navigates the perils of womanhood in her own way, and maybe Gianna would have been skillful, or lucky. Maybe she would have been insulated from sexism by her father’s fame and money, or by the education that he could have bought her; maybe she would have developed a deep inner reservoir of dignity and resolve that some women draw on in the face of sexist injustice. Maybe she would have grown up to resent her father for the alleged attack, or maybe she would have forgiven him, made some kind of peace in adulthood with his darkness and inconsistencies. We simply do not know what kind of person she would have become. Now, we will never know.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist