Today, Explained - Let’s talk about how to talk about Kobe

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

Kobe Bryant’s death stunned the world. Then people started arguing. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. A friend texted me on Sunday. Holy shit. The next text read, Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash. I googled it. No one had written anything about it yet except TMZ. I checked Twitter. People had no idea what to believe. They were still

questioning whether TMZ might have been misinformed, might have been misreporting. But pretty soon, everyone started to realize this was a thing that had really happened. I texted my friends in Los Angeles. None of them had heard the news yet. I texted my mom. She was shocked. It was still too early to process. Eventually, we'd talk about how Kobe might be the biggest loss of an LA icon, maybe ever. And we'd talk about how a friend of my mom's had a really rough childhood, but the only thing her family ever enjoyed together was watching Kobe play for the Lakers. But on Sunday, it was just shock.

Even more so when we found out Kobe's daughter died too. While most of the world was in shock and processing the news, an unexpected fight started brewing online about Kobe Bryant. Or maybe the fight was totally predictable for those of us who spend a lot of time online. Some people wanted to talk about Kobe's rape charges, and other people really didn't. But I think one thing no one saw coming was this fight playing out in a really conspicuous way at the Washington Post. In the hours after Kobe's death, a Washington Post national politics reporter, Felicia Sanmez, tweeted out a 2016 article from the Daily Beast about Kobe Bryant. The article was about his rape case in 2003. The entire tweet was just a link to the article

and the title of the article, which was Kobe Bryant's disturbing rape case, the DNA evidence, the accuser's story, and the half confession. And she was immediately met by immense levels of backlash. People flooding her on Twitter and on her email saying that she was being very disrespectful, saying that it was far too soon to talk about any of these things, saying that this was all driven by an agenda. And she tweeted a little bit later that that was very eye-opening. She pointed out that, to those who have literally emailed me with abuse and death threats, please take a moment and read the story, which was written three years ago and not by me.

Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality, even if that totality is unsettling. She also added in a screenshot of her email inbox to kind of, I guess, prove to people the type of death threats and abuse she was receiving. And that screenshot of her inbox included some of the email information of the people who were abusing her. Well, the abuse didn't stop. She emailed her editors at the Washington Post to tell them that things were getting a little bit out of hand. It took a couple of hours for her to hear back from anyone. And during that time, she found out that her address had been posted online, and she began to fear for her safety. So she started looking

into getting a hotel room and eventually did get a hotel room for the night. So she later told a Washington Post reporter who was covering this Washington Post story that the editors emailed her and asked her to take down the tweets. She did admit that she was a little bit delayed in deleting them, partly because she was fearing for her safety and trying to figure out what to do next. And Tracy Grant, the managing editor of the Washington Post, emailed her again and said if she didn't follow through on deleting her tweets, she would be in violation of a directive from the managing editor. That night, she was actually put on a paid suspension because of the tweets. The newspaper said they were putting her on this paid administrative leave because her tweets displayed poor judgment.

And that her behavior on social media was making it harder for others to do their work as Washington Post journalists. So this is all Sunday night. What happens Monday morning? A lot of journalists were very upset to see this, considering she had merely sent a tweet about a factual story that had been posted. The Washington Post Guild, their union, came to her defense and there was a letter signed by over 300 of her colleagues that was sent to the executive editor of the Washington Post, Marty Barron, and to Tracy Grant. This was a letter in support of Felicia. The next day, they did reinstate Sonmez. And they said that she, it turns out that they had done an investigation and that she did not actually violate the company's social media policy.

However, they didn't apologize to her, and they maintained that they were very disappointed in her actions. Their statement said, we constantly urge restraint, which is particularly important when there are tragic deaths. What do you think was going on here? Why would the Washington Post suspend a journalist for sharing a news article after the death of a legendary American athlete? What was actually playing out here? Well, I think that they responded to the fan backlash that was directed at her and directed at the paper. And that backlash came from the immense amount of grief that everyone was feeling that day. And also our society's inability to handle and to talk about rape allegations. The allegations against Kobe Bryant in 2003 were very serious.

The way the media handled them and the way that law enforcement handled them were very disturbing. And a lot of survivors of sexual assault still remember to this day the silencing effect that the coverage and the treatment of Kobe Bryant's rape case had in 2003. And so for a lot of people, part of mourning Kobe Bryant is remembering this rape case. That is part of the legacy. But there are many more people who would rather not deal with that at all. I mean, you're a sports writer. You're talking about this right now. Have you talked about this on social media? Have you written about this and felt the same sort of backlash that this Washington Post reporter did?

Yeah. So actually, when Kobe Bryant retired in 2016, I was a reporter for Think Progress at the time and wrote an article called The Legacy of the Kobe Bryant Rape Case. And I was met with so much hate and so much abuse for writing that article. And I was told that it wasn't the time to be talking about that, that we were just supposed to be celebrating him now. So I also I cover a lot of sexual assault and domestic violence of athletes as part of my job on a regular basis. And any time you cover that, a part of that coverage is dealing with a backlash. It's usually from people's fans. So if you're talking about Jameis Winston, the abuse will come from, you know, Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans at college, the Florida State Seminoles. You'll

get abuse from those fans. If I talk about past accusations against Ben Roethlisberg, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, I'll get a lot of hate from Pittsburgh Steelers fans. So a lot of the idolizing we do of athletes is based in fandom. And so I would have expected, if I were her, to get that level of vitriol for tweeting out that article, especially at that time. And I think what I've landed on is just that it's a part of the conversation. It's not the whole conversation. He mattered to a lot of people. He's made a positive impact in a lot of ways. And the grief that people have is very real. But at the same time, he had an impact in this other way as well,

and that legacy deserves to be talked about as well. And it's very damaging for survivors in particular. And Felicia Sonmez, we should say, has come out as a sexual assault survivor. So I think when people hear that it's too soon, that we shouldn't talk about that, a lot of times what they're hearing is that their feelings, their pain doesn't matter. Lindsay Gibbs writes a newsletter called Power Plays. It's about women in sports. She also hosts a feminist sports podcast called Burn It All Down. There is a way to talk about how great Kobe was while acknowledging the fact that he may have also hurt people.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Zito Madu writes about sports for SB Nation. He's also a former professional athlete. He played professional soccer in Turkey and for Detroit City FC. But on Sunday, he was just another guy online trying to process the news that the world had just lost Kobe Bryant.

I was seeing writers that I respect who were writing about this then, and they would just put in the fact of the rape case as almost just out of obligation. And then almost as a footnote, you'll see like, but he was also complicated because he had this rape case. And then they'll just move immediately to something else. Right. The word complicated kept getting used as sort of a quick pivot to, okay, here's a graph about a rape case. And then a quick pivot back to like, but he'll always be a legend. Yeah. So if you just say that it's complicated, you don't have to actually deal with what the complication is, right? Like it was just a way of using jargon in order to just move away from something that makes people uncomfortable with his legacy.

Talking about this issue doesn't take away from the feelings that you had from him, or it shouldn't take away from your ability to grieve for him. So you took to Twitter to write something about this, and a lot of people shared it, retweeted it. We ended up seeing it, and that's why we're talking right now. So I wonder, could you tell us what you wrote? Yeah, sure. If you're going to mention a rape case, don't just sprinkle it in there out of obligation. You can just write why someone so heroic to millions of people also represented rape culture at its fullest.

It's not that hard to see that your heroes could be seen in a different light by others, especially when they did do terrible things. So many people, including the media, helped him rehabilitate after the case without ever reckoning with what he did. What happened was what always happens. A powerful man was accused and people shamed the accuser and then went past the issue as quickly as possible. It's not unfair that some are still bitter about that and what it says about our world and how we value women. Every great thing that Kobe did afterwards, his support for women's sports, his love for his children and the youth, his new adventure into other ventures was wonderful, but it's still not up to the fans to grant him a redemption for the rape case. Redemption starts at a people you hurt.

That's the problem with hurting someone. You can't go and erase it, and the power to fix it is not in your hands what kind of reaction did you get when you posted this on twitter surprisingly or at least it surprised me i got dms from women and like survivors who were talking about their conflicted feelings that they had because some of them even adored kobe bryan but they were conflicted in the fact of what he also represented with that rape case in general. And so I got a lot of people who were happy that I said the thing that they were thinking also, because if they had said the same thing, they would have probably received an incredible amount of abuse in a way that I didn't. But naturally there were a bunch of individuals

angry that I will bring up such a thing after he died or just in general, because there's never just a good time to actually talk about situations like this. Why do you think people were receptive to you but would have blasted women for saying the exact same thing? Well, because women in sports in general just get a lot of abuse as if sports is just an all-boys club. And sports fans always see, or male sports fans, always see the fact that you bring up something bad that their heroes did as a way for you to tear them down. For example, the abuse that I got was very particular from other black men who were saying that I was trying to tear Kobe down and I shouldn't be doing so as a black man. I should be supporting him, which was a misinterpretation of what I was doing.

I'm not trying to tear him down. It was simply just bringing in the elephant in the room and saying that you can't just walk past it. Sports is filled with narratives constantly. We're constantly seeing rise and falls and comebacks and epic upsets. I mean, this is a world in which stories are constantly being created and recreated and yet they really struggle with human stories and how to deal with them. What is it about sports that is, you know, particularly vulnerable to tripping up over stuff like this over stories that are complicated? Yeah, I think sports, just because it has a flat narrative is built on that, like the one of the only stories that sports knows how to tell is just redemption stories. So for example, even we're looking at somebody like LeBron,

like he has the rise from him being this like chosen one to him being like great in the NBA. And then he has the fall, which is like 2011 against the Dallas Mavericks or when he moved to the Miami Heat, right? Which is where everybody turns on him. He becomes the villain. But then after that, he comes back to Cleveland, which is his redemption story. So you win there and you're redeemed. And you reach the final stage where everybody just kind of likes you.

And so sports just has these stories. That's all they know how to tell, basically. And when you have a situation that is outside of sports, like sexual assault or rape, in order to tell these stories, you would need a whole new infrastructure that knows how to talk about human problems away from the sporting aspects of it. So what eventually just happens is these big human problems are then seen as things that just need to be overcome, right? Like last year, I wrote about Derrick Rose, who had been accused of rape

and who went through the process while he was with the New York Knicks. And then he went to the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he tried to resuscitate his career. And he had a game where he scored his career-high 50 points. Derrick, 2011 MVP, Rhodes. And the first thing that the announcer said was... He's got a lot of stuff going on off the court.

And I'm not a judge and I'm not a jury. And to my estimation, he's not been convicted of anything. But what he is, he plays hard. He's a gutty basketball player. And so it's just a celebratory thing. And then if somebody like Kobe or somebody like Derrick Rose or some just an individual in sports who has been accused of something like rape or domestic violence, and the media plays a huge role in this, is that if that individual starts playing well again, they turn whatever the crime was or the accused crime was into nothing more than like obstacles for the athlete to overcome. Because in sports,

the only thing that ultimately matters is the victory, like helping the team win in the championship. What was clear to me, like in the wake of Kobe's death and seeing what happened to this Washington Post reporter and seeing threads like yours and all this commentary was that we're still really trying to figure out how to talk in these moments, how to talk about people who have done things that are incredibly good and incredibly bad. And that, I think, transcends sports. You know, I think of people like Woody Allen or Bill Cosby or R. Kelly. What do you think people can do if they want to engage in these conversations and not end up discounting the experiences of people who may have been harmed? For me personally, what I always have is like my moral obligation is just compassion to all the necessary parties, right? Like I just think human life in general is just compassion to all the necessary parties.

I just think human life in general is just a miraculous thing. But I don't just extend that to the people that I like. It's just more of a general thing. And so in the case of someone like Kobe Bryant, if you think Kobe is just this wonderful thing and his existence is one of the best things that's happened to you, then you have to also extend that type of compassion to the victims. You have to extend that to the person that he's hurt. Then you have to reckon with the fact that your hero has done one of the things that you think is bad. And if we're going to ever be fair to victims, if we're ever going to make

a better world, then we have to not let people of great power and importance just get away with whatever simply because they've made us happy or that they mean a lot to us. Zito Madu writes for SB Nation. You can find his piece about Derrick Rose and his tribute to Kobe Bryant at SBNation.com. Just look out for his byline. Zito is Z-I-T-O and Madu is M-A-D-U. You can also find him on Twitter at Zetes. That's Z-E-E-T-S. I'm Sean Ramos for him. I'm at Ramos for him. And this is Today Explained at Today Underscore Explained. Thank you for watching!