For twenty years I have been involved in various political and advocacy groups such as RAINN and the Servicewoman’s Action Network (SWAN) that seek to educate the public about sexual assault and advocate for policies that help victims of assault. I would not be politically active but for my involvement and interest in these groups and the many survivors of sexual assault who I have met and spoke with over the years. I was raped and abused myself on a regular basis for three years of my childhood, and when I enlisted in the Air Force I noticed that many people were being raped and sexually harassed so I became active on the issue of stopping sexual assault in the Air Force. I went to college after the service and on my campus women were raped and they were treated shamefully by the school so I joined an effort on campus to hold the school accountable.
This has been my life and sometimes I’m overcome with sadness because sexual assault has been so pervasive in every institution or organization that I have ever been a part of while people in those institutions blame victims, or deny it altogether. I used to attend groups of survivors with sixty people in a room sharing their stories and how they try to cope with ongoing mental and physical health issues from sexual assault. I volunteered to facilitate a survivors group in the Air Force where I heard dozens more speak in detail about the same thing.
Given this experience and my studies on the subject in college I concluded long ago that institutions and organizations view victims of sexual violence as a threat because they challenge the carefully constructed narratives that institutions and organizations tell about themselves. Just look at the Penn State cover-up of Jerry Sandusky's crimes and how even the student body initially defended Joe Paterno even though Paterno knew Sandusky was raping boys. People wanted to think of Paterno and Penn State in a heroic way so the knowledge of what happened to those boys was unwelcome to them; Penn State and their football program spend millions to a craft an image in the public imagination so the allegations against Sandusky were viewed as a danger to Penn State’s PR campaigns.
Victims were silenced and the public demonstrated sickening callousness toward the victims because a major institution with a lot of money decided to protect itself rather than Sandusky’s victims. It was the same in the Air Force in that the Air Force wants to build prestige and has a heroic way of talking about what it does so first it denied sexual assault was a problem, then it admitted that sexual assault happened but only to very few females, and the Air Force did a good job caring for them; then the Air Force had to admit that the problem of sexual assault was widespread and that it hadn’t done a good job protecting troops and getting them the care they need. Now the Air Force under Trump has retreated from the progress it started making on sexual assault in the military so activists always have to be around to raise the issue, write government officials, and contact the media.
The similarities in the behavior of colleges and the military toward individuals claiming sexual assault is strikingly similar because these institutions depend on recruitment of young people and that recruitment is jeopardized by the allegations. So the institutions always cover-up incidents or silence victims by using any mental illness or alcohol use to discredit them. A person with mental health problems that existed prior to sexual assault is treated no better than a liar and a seeker of attention. Likewise, when someone poor makes an allegation against someone wealthy it is often said that the person who has less money is just making the allegation for fame and to make money for themselves.
The ongoing worldwide sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has all the same markers. It is an institution that relies on prestige in the community to recruit new members that in turn brings in more money and energy back into the institution. That model is jeopardized by sexual assault allegations so the Catholic Church has had to put on a new face lately with a new Pope who is so far untarnished by the scandals. But the Catholic Church has been doing this for centuries and I know because I live in near a reservation where Native Americans talk about it all the time but people seldom pay any attention to them.
People in this country need to think more about how most of their institutions tend to protect and perpetuate sexual abuse, but too often they just focus on criminal justice and getting the perpetrator behind bars. The problem is much deeper than simply convicting people who assault others because at its core sexual assault isn’t about sex it is about power and inequality. The more unequal society becomes the more that those with power will use their power to violate the dignity and human rights of those without power. The Catholic Church was able to get away with abusing Native Americans for so long precisely because Native Americans were powerless and most of society regarded them as savage liars anyway. It was similar with poor children in the US where the church was often seen as doing good charitable works for a group of people who were already thought of as morally suspect.
Most perpetrators who abuse children get away with it for so long because children have very few rights in our society and a lot of adults think that children either make-up or just imagine the assault. Women have been maligned as liars, gold diggers, fools, vengeance-seeking hysterics and so on for centuries while they were mostly barred from any economic or political independence from men. So when a woman makes an allegation against a man we can see this power dynamic play out in the way people defend the alleged perpetrator by invoking these time-worn devices of misogyny and repression.
And that brings me to perpetrators and alleged perpetrators who are celebrities. Superstars or celebrities are more than people—they become institutions in their own right. I took a strong interest in the career of Muhammad Ali because I found him fascinating so I read probably twenty books about him. I learned that he wanted to retire from boxing after 1974, but he felt like he couldn’t because he employed people who would be out of a job if he retired, and there was pressure on him from sponsors to continue boxing because he was making them so much money.
A celebrity becomes a commodity that produces wealth and opportunity for a lot of people so there are a lot of reasons why credible allegations of sexual assault against them are fought so viciously in the media and in court. I highly doubt that figures such as Roman Polanski or R Kelly could have possibly escaped justice for so long if it were not for so many wealthy individuals who had an interest in silencing or ignoring accusations. I will say the same for Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, and Jeffery Epstein. After the release of Leaving Neverland by HBO last year social media and the internet exploded with defenses of Jackson that questioned the credibility and motives of the accusers as well as the credibility and motives of the filmmakers. A lot of people said things online such as “Michael Jackson is dead and we should let him rest in peace.” But a lot of people have a lot of interest in making the allegations against Jackson go away because they stand to make a lot of money from his legacy in the way that Elvis earned more after he died for people he never met than he ever earned while living. In sports and entertainment—as well as in life—our judgement of what and who is good is influenced by our perceptions of someone’s character and with celebrities that public perception is constantly shaped and molded by agents, publicists, and PR firms everyday in a manner similar to the major institutions I discussed above.
In my experience it took three years of reporting by me before someone finally took what I said seriously and the perpetrator was sent to prison. Three years! In my survivor’s groups I’ve met people who have never been believed; people who have been believed after 10 years; and people who have only been believed after an assailants death by natural causes makes it safe for others to believe them. There are a lot of people who defend assailants against accusations by victims and this even happens in families where a child reports abuse and the parent ignores them or blames the child for bringing the abuse on themselves.
Even people who have never been sexually assaulted usually have at least some understanding of how difficult and traumatizing reporting can be so it is amazing to me that the notion that false reporting is common still persists. A person who makes a false report commits a crime so unless that person has been charged and convicted of making a false report we can’t just assume the accusation is false even if the alleged perpetrator is eventually acquitted in court. A not guilty verdict just means that the prosecution didn’t prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt according to a jury. OJ Simpson is a murderer even though the jury found that he was legally not guilty. We are so quick to call an allegation of sexual assault false even though it is a crime to make a false report and assume the person is guilty of making a false report even though they are never charged with the crime.
There never is a good time to talk about sexual assault because people don’t want to talk about it. We hear all kinds of excuses for not talking about it. Frequently victims of sexual perpetrators will be told that their accusations are going to “ruin someone’s life,” or “ruin someone’s career.” This is false because it is the actions of the perpetrator and not the victim that jeopardized their life and career—the victim is merely reporting that they think a crime was committed against them. Or, like with Michael Jackson, they say there is no point in talking about it since he died and that is false because I know it can take years for victims to be believed and often the death of their assailant is what opens the space for them to speak and be heard.
This is why I find the coverage and virtual censorship of the credible rape allegation against Kobe Bryant so outrageous. Basically we are being told that to mention this incident is disrespectful to his legacy and his family and that is the same crap I’ve heard my whole life. Victims are basically told that the person they accused is really a good person and is willing to make it up to them but the person who abused them ‘could lose everything’ or that the person who abused them ‘has a family, too.’ It is sort of like the disgusting way in which Mika Brzezinski used her show to advocate for her friend Mark Halperin by insinuating that the women who accused him were being unreasonable by making accusations against him and that Mark would be willing to meet with them to apologize and make things right:
Brzezinski had been discussing the avalanche of sexual harassment allegations against powerful men in recent weeks on "Morning Joe" when she said that Halperin, a friend of hers, "is more than willing to meet with his accusers and apologize [to] them face--to-face."
"I've actually tried to offer him to them," Brzezinski said. "They don't want to talk to him. They don't want to talk to him."
Emily Miller, who wrote on Twitter in October that Halperin had once "attacked" her, told CNN that she was "so upset" by the remarks that she was "shaking."
"I can't retraumatize myself to be in the same room with him to please Mika Brzezinski and her rich and famous friends," Miller told CNN. "If Halperin genuinely wanted to apologize, he could send a letter or put it in public domain. Instead he has on the record denied my accusations which is extremely painful as a victim to be denied the truth. It is disgusting and unethical of Mika to use the power of her show to shame me, a sexual assault victim, into meeting with the man who did that to me."
I’ll never forget when Mika did that because I’ve listened to so many survivors of sexual assault describe similar circumstances where an enabler of abuse tries to make the problem go away for the abuser. Frequently these tactics are coercive and often come with threats or promises of rewards for going along with the person or group by staying silent or retracting the allegation. Often it is in this stage where the victim may be portrayed as mentally ill, financially unstable, irrational, unreasonably difficult, or out for vengeance to destroy a good person’s life.
What I find so infuriating about Bryant’s case is the rape was repackaged by Bryant, the Lakers, and Nike into this Black Mamba identity. Basically Bryant cast himself as the victim in the rape case and that is the origin of the Black Mamba name:
Remember that shit? The world seems to have forgotten along the way to facilitating Bryant’s total public rehabilitation. On the night of July 1, 2003, Bryant choked a 19-year-old employee of the Eagle, Colorado hotel where he was staying (hard enough to leave bruises on her neck), bent her over a chair, and drew blood during the ensuing sex act. By the end of the night, she’d told a coworker that Bryant had forced himself on her; by the end of the next day he’d been contacted by local police. During the resulting criminal investigation, Bryant did not deny the encounter; he didn’t deny choking her; he even admitted he’d never asked for her consent, claiming to have inferred it from her body language. When it was all over—that is, after Bryant’s lawyers intimidated the woman out of the courtroom by reframing the forensic evidence to suggest that she was a lying slut—he even apologized for it, more or less...That this type of thing is a dismally familiar tactic in defending against rape charges makes it no less fucking cynical and evil.
Here is a little more about the Black Mamba from WAPO:
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In the case’s aftermath, a landmark sexual assault scandal during the emerging 24-hour news cycle, Bryant’s jersey sales plummeted and McDonald’s and Coca-Cola cut ties.
“They didn’t want the gritty s---,” he says now. “And most people still don’t.”
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With that in mind, some within Bryant’s circle suggest he has convinced himself that Colorado either never happened or that, if he continues flooding his résumé with accomplishments, the public will neither remember nor care.
- “The length, the snake, the bite, the strike, the temperament,” he says, and it wasn’t lost on him that snakes can also shed their skin. “ ‘Let me look this s--- up.’ I looked it up — yeah, that’s me. That’s me!’ ”
- When Bryant returned to the court, the wholesome young athlete was gone. In his place was a man who could no longer convincingly portray innocence, and Bryant says he felt free to reveal the darkness that had always lurked inside him.
- Creating an alternate persona, he says now, was the only way he could mentally move beyond the events of Colorado.
- “I don’t know what would’ve happened had I not figured it out,” he says. “Because the whole process for me was trying to figure out how to cope with this. I wasn’t going to be passive and let this thing just swallow me up. You’ve got a responsibility: family, baby, organization, whole city, yourself — how do you figure out how to overcome this? Or just deal with it and not drown from this thing? And so it was this constant quest: to figure out how do you do that, how do you do that, how do you do that? So I was bound to figure something out because I was so obsessively concerned about it.”
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“The Black Mamba” would become the first character Bryant introduced to the world. Nike, the only major company to stand by Bryant, introduced a snake-inspired logo and signature sneaker — complete with a video ad, Bryant leaping over a speeding Aston Martin, that was too good to be true.
“Nobody knew,” Nike CEO Mark Parker said in a recent email, “if it was real or if it was fake.”
But it moved the discussion past Colorado
So in his quest to overcome the hardship of the credible rape allegation against him Kobe created— with the help of Nike— the Black Mamba where he embraced his inner darkness because his former public identity as a nice guy would no longer cut it in light of the sexual assault. The Black Mamba was created as a PR campaign to overcome the bad press and loss of money suffered as a result of a rape allegation. Then that same Black Mamba brand is used in girl’s basketball and held up by the media as evidence of Bryant’s commitment to women’s basketball and that is just gross.
I really don’t know if Bryant was a rapist but I think after reading the publicly available information and court documents that he probably did it. Most of Bill Cosby’s victims and Jeffery Epstein’s victims never even went to court or had an examination at a hospital the way the girl in the Bryant case did. It takes a lot of guts to take your case as far as she did especially with the death threats and intimidation the woman received by Bryant’s fans so I think she should be believed. The woman has never retracted any part of her allegations in all these years. How do all the defenders of Bryant explain away all the physical evidence in that case?
There are people who will protest what I say about Bryant because “it is too soon to talk about this,” or that “we should not speak ill of the dead.” Or that we shouldn’t talk about the rape out of respect for his family. If I were in the presence of his family I wouldn’t bring it up and I genuinely feel like what happened yesterday was a terrible tragedy for that family. I don’t want anyone to die, and I don’t want anyone to lose a loved one even if their loved one is a rapist or murderer. Even rapists and murderers deserve good and fair treatment with dignity, but they shouldn’t be rewarded or put on pedestals for their profit and for the profit of billion-dollar corporations.
I didn’t know Kobe Bryant as a person but like all entertainers he became more than a person because so many business interests made so much money. The refusal to include more discussion of the sexual assault he likely committed is another example of this society’s inability to deal with this complicated problem, particularly when so many corporations stand to make so much off his name now that he has passed. If we don’t talk about it now then if we bring it up later people will say it is old news and leave the guy alone now that he’s passed like Michael Jackson. This diary isn’t even really about Kobe as much as it is the media and how our culture is very good at disappearing victims all while we mouth platitudes about women’s rights and how the Me Too movement is finally changing things.
If it pisses people off that I wrote about Bryant’s rape charge then I have succeeded. When I started working on the issue of Military Sexual Assault (MST) it was during the Iraq War and I had a lot of negative and pissed reactions out of people. People would say it wasn’t that big of a deal; that soldiers made it up; we couldn’t focus on MST while our troops were dying in Iraq; we don’t want to mess with the chain of command. A lot of survivors of sexual abuse pissed a lot of people off when they reported abuse and sometimes it is good to piss people off because people in this country need to wake up.