If you’re a Kobe Bryant fan, that’s fine. If you’re sad about his death, that’s fine. If you choose to express your grief about his death, that’s fine. But if you try to minimize the severity of his being an admitted rapist to justify your warm feelings for him, that is NOT fine. And it will never be fine. Calling rape an “ethical misstep” so that you feel better about liking a rapist is not acknowledging his crime. It’s minimizing it. And that makes you part of the problem.
I wasn’t going to comment on his death at all. I know nothing about basketball. I don’t care about basketball. I don’t even know who he played for. To me he was just another rich athlete criminal who got away with rape. He was a rapist, and now he’s dead. Good, fuck him. But for people to minimize rape in order to make it look acceptable to mourn for him is absolutely repugnant. If you want to say you are sad he’s dead, that’s fine. You’re allowed to be sad for whatever reason you like. But have the backbone enough to just say it. Don’t minimize his crimes to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing.
Update: someone called Kobe raping his victim a “mistake.” And I’m not having it. When you refer to rape as a mistake, that’s bullshit. And you called it a mistake three times. It very much feels like an attempt to minimize it. It wasn’t a mistake. He chose to rape someone. It was a choice. And I can’t help feeling that if you were to replace the word “mistake” with “rape,” you would never have posted what you wrote. Even replacing “mistake” with “crime” makes what you wrote sound pretty bad. And I think that’s why you didn’t use those words. Because “mistake” sounds so much easier to live with. After all, everyone makes mistakes, right? Well, no, because rape is not a mistake, and not everyone is a rapist. Calling rape a mistake is a lie that serves an agenda.
He admitted he did it. People love to bring up that his victim refused to testify, but conveniently forget the part where he admitted that he did it. Isn’t that interesting? He admitted it was NOT consensual. That’s why he apologized. You don’t have to apologize for consensual sex. And there’s no such thing as nonconsensual sex. That’s called rape. And that’s what he apologized for. Rape.
