Kobe Bryant: Consent and the Carceral Shadow of a Life Incomplete

Kobe Bryant is now in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He entered in what is perhaps the most decorated Hall of Fame class in the history of the institution. Among the events that inform how athletes and other public figures are perceived are off-court activities and events. On the last day of June 2003, Kobe Bryant had a sexual encounter with a young woman in his suite in a Colorado resort. What resulted from that encounter was part sports spectacle, part legal proceedings, and all public privacy. Legal decisions and actions of an NBA African American icon-under-construction became a part of news coverage for nearly 2 years. This coverage was the onset of Kobe’s “carceral shadow.” W.E.B. Du Bois (1899:254, 249) suggested that, “Crime comes either in spite of intelligence or as a result of misdirected intelligence under severe economic and moral strain… We must add to this the influences of social position and connections in procuring whites pardons or lighter sentences.” That young Colorado woman accused Kobe of sexual assault. Graphic accounts and other evidence presented in the court of public opinion led to a large payment to the alleged victim which ended the civil suit and the legal process. Despite the absence of a trial and conviction, one can understand Kobe through the lens of a carceral citizenship. Similar circumstances—on mere allegation alone—often led to the lynching death of many Black men throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kobe’s carceral shadow followed him from that day forward through an arc of post-non-trial redemption. In this work, I consider these themes in relation to Kobe’s iconic “life incomplete.”