All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 27, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:07
Kobe Bryant Dead!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Basketball superstar and legend Kobe Bryant has been killed today.
I'm sure you've heard in an awful, awful helicopter crash.
He was on his way with his daughter and some other children and parents to a game, a basketball game his daughter was playing in and the other children too.
The helicopter went down and all aboard were killed and it's a terrible thing.
I was actually at the gym and I saw this on the screen on the news and, you know, it's one of these things where it's a reminder of just how fleeting and sudden and savage end of life can be, how little we can take the future for granted and it's a powerful moment, of course, to remind us.
To live life to the fullest, because you never know when the two wet fingers of infinity are going to close themselves around the little flame of our lives.
And I also found myself bothered.
Because what happens is, you know, you go on Twitter or you watch the news, you go to Facebook, and there's this outpouring of grief and worship and adulation for a man who was...
Really good at putting balls in hoops.
And you know, the game is exciting and all of that.
It's not my favorite game, but it's an exciting game.
But he is, you know, he's a highly trained, highly skilled, hard-working athlete.
And the worship and the veneration of people for other than their moral qualities I find to be extremely disturbing.
And I think one of the markers of a decaying or in some ways degenerate civilization to really worship and praise people for To some degree, accidents of birth.
I mean, he obviously was born with fantastic genetics, had a great work ethic too, worked out all the time.
But, you know, you and I could probably work out as much, or at least when we were younger would never have been the basketball player that he was.
He just had an immense, innate talent, and put it to good use, obviously.
But this veneration and worship of people and this grieving of people for their capacity to do things, Morally unimportant tasks like kicking balls or throwing balls or catching balls or whatever I mean it's again I don't want to sound like a complete killjoy sports are fun and I enjoy sports but the idea that there's this it's sort of like with Princess Diana which I guess was the stake through the heart of the fairy tale for women that if you marry the prince you'll be happier happy ever after in which case well you probably get bumped by white fiat and Diana Tunnel in Paris,
but this veneration, it troubles me.
It troubles me because we really should love people for their virtues, not for their talents, their abilities, their singing voices, their looks, their fame, their money, their sports ball expertise is not where we should put our love.
And it's almost like since Christianity has largely fallen away in the West.
We have turned to the idolatry of tumoresque talent, like talent that's way off the edge of the bell curve, and we have begun to worship people as demigods who are astoundingly skilled in a particular area.
We have become Like the golden calf, we have become the idolatrous of fetishistic talent worship.
And that is not good. That is not good because it's bad for the people who have that talent because then they get all this worship and this adulation without actually having to be good and moral people.
It's bad for us! Because we think, well, if I want to be loved, Citizen Kane style, what I must do is accumulate wealth or power or money or talents or influence or political authority or something like that.
And this is not what grows love.
This is not what connects us to each other.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue.
If we are virtuous, if we are not virtuous, then we have neutral or contemptuous responses to love.
Evildoers' response to virtue is to hate it.
Good people's response to virtue is to love it.
And I don't really know that there's many people who are actually indifferent to it.
But it is troubling to see this sort of outpouring of grief and adulation and love and so on to a guy Whose moral qualities were highly, highly questionable, but whose skill in handling a basketball was very strong.
So let's go back a little bit here.
I'll put the links to this below.
The legacy of the Kobe Bryant rape case...
On June 30, 2003, Kobe Bryant arrived at the Codellara Lodge and Spa in Edwards, Colorado.
He basically was in town the next day.
He was going to have an operation on his knee.
A 19-year-old concierge at the hotel showed the superstar and his security team to their rooms and caught his eye.
Bryant, a new father of a six-month-old daughter, made small talk with the blonde, and once they arrived at his room, he took her aside and requested that she come back later to give him a private tour of the hotel.
She obliged, and after the tour and mild flirtation, Bryant invited her into his room.
Just five minutes later, the woman exited the room disheveled and reportedly distraught.
Her underwear was bloody, as was Bryant's shirt.
She told her friend, a bellboy at the hotel, about the encounter that night, and after making sure the woman got home safely, the bellboy went home and told his father.
The next day, after recounting the incident to her mother, the woman reported it to police.
Whether or not Bryant and the woman engaged in sexual activity that night is not in question.
Bryant admitted to cheating on his wife, Vanessa, but the woman he claimed to have committed adultery with said she did not consent to that activity.
And it is pretty wild.
The criminal charges were ultimately dropped after 15 months and the civil case was settled behind closed doors, although the rumors are that he paid her quite a bit of money.
But it is pretty wild what happened, right?
The media circus descended upon this small Colorado town on July 2nd.
Both the alleged victim and Bryant were taken to the hospital for examinations.
There was a small bruise around her neck and she had tears on her vaginal wall.
An arrest warrant was issued for Bryant on July 4th and on July 18th charges were filed.
And yes, I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff about her, but there seems to be some instability and so on.
But man alive, did Kobe Bryant's lawyers just cheese-grate her reputation in public.
Mark Shaw, an attorney and author who covered the case for ESPN and USA Today, told Think Progress, in the Kobe Bryant case, it was abominable how the accuser was treated.
Everyone was at fault. This poor woman, they wore her down, and it happened from the first hearings.
So there was a preliminary hearing on October 2003.
It was supposed to be just a chance for the judge to decide whether there was enough evidence to require a trial.
But Brian's attorney, Pamela McKee, used it as a chance to smear the alleged victim's reputation.
She used the alleged victim's name a staggering six times during the hearing, but when she was presented with the woman's vaginal injuries, McKee used the victim's sexual history against her.
The high-powered lawyer brought the hearing to a screeching halt asking, could it be that the alleged victim's injuries were caused by having sex with three men in three days?
And it really worked.
It really worked.
It worked. And the evidence, such as the retelling of the statements the alleged victim gave to officers the day after the attack, deserved attention.
And I quote, When Bryant began groping her, the woman said she tried to flee, but the athlete barred her way and grabbed her by the neck.
Winters said she was afraid that he was going to choke her.
Then the woman said Bryant turned her around, pushed her against a chair, pulled down her panties and raped her.
She tearfully said no twice, but was ignored, Winters said.
At one point, Bryant stated that he liked Vale, Colorado, he said.
Five minutes later, it was over, Winter said, and Bryant made her kiss his genitals.
Then he told her to go clean up.
Now, if it was five minutes, I mean, the idea that a woman's cycle of arousal can be like soup to nuts, so to speak, in five minutes is to me incomprehensible.
So the article says, just days before the criminal case went to trial, the alleged victim decided to stop cooperating and the charges were dropped.
Up until that moment, she had been put through the wringer.
She had friends, acquaintances, and even strangers accept money from the tabloids or gifts from television producers to tell stories.
Some the truth with a spin to it, others outright lies.
Photos of the alleged victim were also leaked and plastered all over magazines and the supermarket.
Even the Eagle County Court contributed to the onslaught by inadvertently making private court documents public.
As Shaw wrote at the time, quote, With her identity known, her past sex life revealed, her mental state common knowledge, and her life in shambles, due to constant anguish about the motive behind the charges, it's no wonder that she threw in the towel.
Because the case received so much coverage, everyone, even those not paying close attention, saw what happened to the alleged victim.
It's nearly impossible to measure that impact.
According to Shapiro's book, however, there are other women who had similar encounters with Bryant, one in particular who was able to escape before an assault occurred, who wouldn't cooperate with the Colorado trial because of how the alleged victim in that case was treated.
In the immediate aftermath of the hearing, it was no surprise that sexual assault reporting declined dramatically at the alleged victim's school, the University of Northern Colorado.
How many women remember the Kobe Bryant case and don't file a rape?
So despite being charged with sexual assault and false imprisonment, facing life in prison, and tearfully confessing to committing adultery with his 19-year-old accuser, Bryant's case never made it to trial.
On September 1st, 2004, one week before opening statements were to be made, the case was dismissed after the accuser, who'd been dragged through the mud for months by the media, and Bryant's defense team informed the court that she would not testify.
The woman had filed a separate civil suit against Bryant and had agreed to dismissal of the sexual assault charge against him provided the athlete issue the following apology to his accuser, which was read in court by Bryant's attorney.
I won't read the whole thing, but he said, I now recognize that she did not and does not view the incident the same way I did.
After months of reviewing Discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.
I issued this statement today, fully aware that while one part of this case ends today, another remains.
And yeah, it was brutal in the media, and it had a really, really strong effect.
Rape shield laws were then eventually improved in Colorado, and that's what happened.
And they accused her.
I mean, people say, oh, she's money hungry.
She's lying.
She's attacked.
But she actually came from a wealthy family.
Money wasn't particularly an issue for her.
Now, of course, I don't know what happened, and we may never know, probably never will know what happened in those five minutes.
I mean, it's really one of two possibilities, given that he admitted that he had sex with this woman who was 19, and he had a six-month-old baby at home.
So he is admitted to the infidelity, and his wife, I think, threatened to divorce him, and his wife accused him of having affairs with over a hundred women.
Now, you know, the stereotype of basketball players.
What is it? Wilt Chamberlain claimed he'd had sex with 10,000 women?
Because, you know, 11,000 would be nuts.
So... We don't know what happened, but it's really one of two possibilities.
Either he did rape her, which would explain the bruise in her neck if he grabbed at her neck and she thought he was going to choke her.
It would explain the vaginal tearing.
It would explain the blood on his shirt and on her panties and so on.
Or he didn't rape her.
They had gross five-minute consensual sex that resulted in blood and vaginal tearing.
And That's who he chose to have an affair with, a woman who was so unstable that she'd go up and jump the bones of a guy she had just met, and then accuse him of rape the next day, and then back out of it.
Like, somebody so unstable.
That's who he chose to have sex with.
So, you know, good basketball player?
Yeah, without a doubt. And, you know, when the skill set leaves the world, I guess we can understand, although his skill set had already left basketball.
But as far as mourning, or any kind of hero, or anything like that, my God, no.
Good God, no.
Stop giving people this insane tribute of worshipping them, and looking up at them, and respecting them, when they're like this.
When they have this tribute.
Decision set in their life.
They say, ah, well, but there's remorse and there's change and there's growth and there's this and there's that.
It's like...
Maybe there is.
Maybe there is. But I think you work hard to make amends.
Maybe he did. Maybe he did behind the scenes.
I don't know. But, my gosh, I mean, you think of Brett Kavanaugh's life was destroyed by what are, to me, completely false allegations.
And then Kobe Bryant's, I think, much more credible allegations against him.
Well, he had a lot of money, he had a lot of power, he had a lot of lawyers.
And he had the media on his side, because, of course, the media likes the fact that he drew in eyeballs for their advertising dollars.
His sports agents loved that he made him a huge amount of money.
And... I mean, he had whole business interests.
He was marketing $200 sneakers, I think a lot of times, to poor kids, in my opinion.
But anyway, you know, he was a guy who was very good at basketball.
He was not very good at being a husband.
I mean, he was a self-admitted cheater with at least one woman, and his wife claimed more than a hundred more.
And he then bought her a $4 million apology ring, right?
So, you know, but he'd made a vow.
To remain faithful to her.
And people say, well, but he was a good father.
And it's like, hmm, I don't know that a good father goes and has sex with a stranger, even if we assume that it was consensual.
I don't think a good father goes and has sex with a stranger when he's got a six-month-old baby at home.
Come on. As far as being a good husband, well, you make a vow.
He was a Catholic. You make a vow in the eyes of God to be faithful to your wife.
And you're supposed to take those vows with about as great a seriousness as you can muster in this mortal plane.
That is the point of those vows.
And he broke the vows that he made in the eyes of God, at peril to his soul and his salvation, according to his wife, more than 100 times.
I imagine, if it's anything to do with standard basketball practice, many times even more than that.
And he sat and said to his lawyers, you go and trash this woman.
You go and trash this girl.
You go and rain legal hellfire down upon her.
And again, maybe she's a crazy person.
Maybe she had really rough five-minute consensual sex with a guy she just met, in which case she's really unstable and he's taking advantage of a crazy person to get his rocks off.
Contemptible. No matter which way you slice this savage cake.
We need to save our adulation for people who do great moral good in the world.
We've got to resist the urge to deify mere ability, mere talent.
You know, I bet you in the court of the king, whichever king you wish to choose, there is an executioner who is the very best executioner.
Takes the head off in one shot.
No suffering.
No screaming. No double hits.
And it's a miracle how quickly he can separate head from body.
Nobody can understand the level of skill that he brings to the table.
It's a very powerful skill.
It's very much on the edge of the bell curve of executioners.
Now, of course, Kobe Bryant was not an executioner, but the worship of skill is a way of destroying our love of virtue, you understand?
To worship skill is to denigrate Virtue.
Why do people worship ugliness in order to denigrate and destroy the concept of beauty?
Why do people worship anti-reason to destroy the concept of rationality and the virtue of reason?
Why do people venerate the merely athletically competent So that the truly moral among us will pass through us and pass among us like ghosts who frighten us rather than heroes.
▲
Export Selection