Don’t airbrush Kobe’s past

ON SOCIAL media this week, a lot of people who had never met kobe Bryant offered their thoughts on his sad passing. There is no question that a hotel maid working at the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera, a resort in Edwards, Colorado, did meet Bryant on june 30, 2003. Yet it is her very real memories these same folk want airbrushed from memory. Felicia Sonmez, a reporter from the

Washington Post, tweeted a link to a forensic account of events that night — which ended in an allegation of rape — and found herself the victim of another kind of assault. Her newspaper suspended her, shamefully, and tens of thousands directed their anger at her apparent insensitivity, calling for her to be sacked. The phrase #Bye Felicia — stolen from the film Friday — began trending on Twitter, often from the fingertips of people not brave enough to use their own names. The backlash against the backlash, however, appears to have saved Sonmez from her cowardly employers. The Washington Post, confronted by an internal revolt from hundreds of her colleagues, including Pulitzer Prize winners, have since announced Sonmez was guilty of no more than bad timing. Even that seems to stretch it a little. Anyone who has read the details of the case would find them problematic. Bryant, too, apparently. ‘I want to apologise directly to the young woman involved in this incident. I want to apologise to her for my behaviour that night and for the consequences she has suffered in the past year. I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter,’ he wrote, prior to settling a civil court action. So amid the deluge of words eulogising Bryant the athlete, and the man, there was surely also room for this shade. Sonmez had written about her own experiences of sexual abuse in 2018; in the circumstances, her reaction to the unquestioning celebration of Bryant in death was hardly out of character. Yet this remains the dilemma. Separating the athlete from the human being. It can happen in life, too, as the organisers of the Australian open are discovering as they grapple around the acknowledgement of Margaret Court. I wrote this newspaper’s tribute to Bryant on Sunday, the one that appeared in the sports pages the next day. Three quarters in, I paused and wondered whether to include mention of the rape allegation against him. I decided it didn’t feel right to record that, but not other aspects of his personal life. So the piece limited itself to Bryant the baller, to his influence on the sport, his athletic style, the respect of his peers. But that doesn’t mean there are not other stories to be told; and because some mourners do not want to hear them, it does not mean they do not exist.