"Gianna is a beast. She’s better than I was at her age. She’s got it. Girls are amazing. I would have five more girls if I could. I’m a girl dad."

Said Kobe Bryant, about his daughter Gianna, in a quote etched in the plaque at the base of this newly unveiled statue installed outside the Lakers' Crypto.com Arena:

The Athletic supplies context: "Kobe, Gianna and seven others died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, Calif., on Jan. 26, 2020, while traveling to a basketball tournament for Gianna. Two of her teammates, three other parents, an assistant coach and the pilot were all on board."

Remember that time Maureen Dowd needed to kick Rush Limbaugh, right after he announced he had advanced lung cancer, and she didn't spell his name right, because it was so important to remind us of the worst thing he ever said?

ADDED: This reminds me of the recent cancel-culture attack on Joe Rogan. You've got someone who talks for hours and hours and is good because he's free-wheeling and not too self-censoring. That makes for good listening. It's how to get popular on the radio or in podcasting. But it also means that there's a huge set of material that your antagonists can sift through, and the worst thing you ever said will be used as if it was most representative of the kind of person you are.

From a different perspective, it also reminds me of the reaction to the death of Kobe Bryant. Dowd is like the few people who brought up the old rape charge against Bryant. In this perspective, Dowd is not the canceller but the one who could be targeted for cancellation because of her lack of empathy for the person who has met with terrible misfortune. But she doesn't need to worry too much about that, because Rush Limbaugh is on the right and because his misfortune is his alone — there's no sweet daughter simultaneously struck by this lung cancer.

"Every time a beloved celebrity dies I post some horrible shit about them I’ve been doing it for years now. I like destroying gods. And right when a famous person dies they’re at their most worshipped."

"So as a response to all the outpouring of sympathy on social media, I post something vile. it’s just a joke. I don’t really hate any of the people."

Said Ari Shaffir, quoted in "New York Comedy Club cancels Ari Shaffir act after threats over Kobe Bryant joke" (Page Six).

WaPo suspends a journalist who reacted to Kobe Bryant's death by tweeting a link to the 2016 Daily Beast article "Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession."

The Daily Mail reports.

[Felicia] Sonmez says she has received death threats after posting the tweets. In follow-up tweets, Sonmez wrote: ‘Well, THAT was eye-opening. To the 10,000 people (literally) who have commented and emailed me with abuse and death threats, please take a moment and read the story - which was written 3+ years ago, and not by me. Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality even if that public figure is beloved and that totality unsettling.... That folks are responding with rage and threats toward me (someone who didn’t even write the piece but found it well-reported) speaks volumes about the pressure people come under to stay silent in these cases.’

In another follow-up tweet, Sonmez wrote: ‘As an addendum: Hard to see what’s accomplished by messages such as these. If your response to a news article is to resort to harassment and intimidation of journalists, you might want to consider that your behavior says more about you than the person you’re targeting.’

Sonmez deleted these tweets, but of course, they were preserved by her antagonists and there were demands that WaPo fire her (or send her to Wuhan, China to cover the spread of the coronavirus).

The reaction to the Sonmez tweets has brought more attention to the rape charges against Bryant. The Daily Mail takes advantage of the occasion to spell out all the details. If Sonmez violated journalistic standards by bringing up negative material about a recently deceased person, does a story about Sonmez's alleged violation not commit the same violation (if it is a violation)? Or does Sonmez's going first immunize everyone who goes after, as long as they present Sonmez as the story?

I suspect Sonmez thought we were living in the #MeToo era, and we don't participate in the hiding of the rape stories of eminent men anymore.

Kobe Bryant has died.

What if the NYT put up a fawning acknowledgment of Kobe Bryant's retirement announcement, replete with his “Dear Basketball” poem...

... and all the commenters wanted to do was trash him for that rape he was never convicted of?

Highest-rated comment:

A vile, horrible man. I never fail to marvel over how the rape accusation simply disappeared into thin air--once the alleged victim (who received numerous death threats, and, it's rumored, cash from Kobe) withdrew her charges. It was never again mentioned by the Times or any other media outlet, in what seemed an Orwellian silence. Apparently his ability to shoot balls through a hoop is far more important than his treatment of women. I hope he burns in hell, along with all those who think that making money is more important than stopping rapists.

The Kobe Bryant arrest predates this blog, so I have nothing in the archive about it. Most of what I know about Bryant comes from this excellent New Yorker article from March 2014, "The Fourth Quarter/Kobe Bryant confronts a long—and possibly painful—goodbye":

“I was stubborn as a fucking mule,” he said.... He was the Black Mamba, a nickname he gave himself after watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” in which the snake, known for its agility and aggressiveness, was used as a code name for a deadly assassin....

The adoption of an alter ego was a way of coping, Bryant now admits, with the fallout from his arrest for sexual assault, in a Colorado hotel room, in the summer of 2003. The charges were later dismissed, and a civil settlement was reached with the alleged victim, but Bryant struggled with the perception that he was damaged goods. “After the Colorado incident, I had every major sponsor drop me, except for Nike,” he told me. “So I’m sitting there thinking, What am I going to do now? My vision was to build a brand and do all these things.” (Bryant was born a brand, named after the Kobe beef at a Japanese steak house in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.) “Now everybody’s telling me I can’t do it,” he went on. “The name just evokes such a negative emotion. I said, ‘If I create this alter ego, so now when I play this is what’s coming out of your mouth, it separates the personal stuff, right?’ You’re not watching David Banner—you’re watching the Hulk.”

Racial discipline for Kobe Bryant.

Yesterday, I posted about that New Yorker article about Kobe Bryant, which I'd listened to in podcast form. The one thing that jumped out at me as bloggable — from what was a very long article — was his comment about abstaining from the politics around Trayvon Martin, and now I see that I wasn't the only one.

The author of the article, Ben McGrath has an item today about the "contentious debate" stirred up by a question he'd asked with "no particular expectation of controversy." This new piece seems like an effort to protect Bryant from criticism, and it also reveals that Bryant himself has been working to shore up his reputation (by tweeting "Martin was wronged" and "the system did not work").

Read the whole thing, which includes this Bryant quote: "I won’t say, ‘O.K., I’m going to vote for Obama just because he’s an African-American... I’m not going to do that in a million years." And there's material about Bryant spending 7 years of his youth in Italy and getting "a strong sense that there is 'a much bigger world out there,'" and how he's been called "somewhat confused about culture because he was brought up in another country."

"There's a bigger issue in terms of being an African-American athlete, and the box people try to put you in..."

"And it's always a struggle to step outside of that," says Kobe Bryant, in the excellent (but subscription-only) New Yorker article titled "The Fourth Quarter, Kobe Bryant confronts a long—and possibly painful—goodbye." The article is by Ben McGrath, who continues in this paragraph (on page 45 of a piece that goes from 38 to 49):

When I brought up LeBron James posting online a photo of the Heat players dressed in hoodies, with their heads bowed, in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, as political expression, Bryant seemed nonplussed. "I won't react to something just because I'm supposed to, because I'm African-American," he said. "That argument doesn't make sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and as a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American, we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we've progressed as a society? Well, if we've progressed as a society, then you don't jump to somebody's defense just because they're African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won't assert myself."

The Platonic ideal of the celebrity trial reporter.

It's hard being a well-educated person, interested in the life of the mind, blessed with the job of writing for the New York Times, covering the Michael Jackson trial. You need to find ways to distinguish yourself, to preserve your dignity. Here's John M. Broder:

Drawn by the flame of the klieg lights and the television money that powers them, lawyer-commentators have been a fixture at widely publicized trials at least since William Kennedy Smith was tried and acquitted of rape in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1991. The tribulations of O. J. Simpson, Kobe Bryant, Scott Peterson and now Michael Jackson have brought this traveling band of analysts to the media bivouacs that spring up around America's celebrity show trials.

Greta Van Susteren, who cut her television teeth on Mr. Smith's trial and then gained nationwide fame covering Mr. Simpson's trial, was one of the trailblazers and remains the Platonic ideal of the talking head, with a law degree and her own television show. (Plato himself, who offered expert commentary on Socrates' bombshell trial in 399 B.C., would have been the first, except there was no cable back then.)

Nicely played. I particularly like the phrase "television teeth."