The more pertinent question is, if you are the girl in question who is working at a hotel making no more than $15 an hour, and you are about to go on the stand in front of the universe in a high profile case against an extremely wealthy and popular athlete, and you are going to talk about every detail of what happened - rape or almost rape or whatever it was, and it was most certainly sex - and you realize that the defendant will have the best and most expensive attorneys money can buy, whereas you have a public defendant in a suit...then you are all of a sudden offered a large sum of money (meaning in excess of a million dollars) to drop the whole thing...then would you consider this alternative?
Of course you would.
The girl was paid money to drop the case. How much money I don't know, but I have a close friend who is a pretty notable do entary film producer, and she worked for about three months on a do entary about this case. She eventually abandoned it because she normally distributes through HBO, and they called her to do another project which took approximately 18 months to do. By then the case was dropped and that was that, although her desire to continue with the film was extremely high. My filmmaker friend is a rape victim herself, and has worked with rape victims for many years. She wanted very, very badly to make the film because she said that the type of onslaught this girl was receiving was even more harsh than she had thought it might be, and she knew that it would be considerable with Bryant being a popular athlete. However, she's in NY and isn't really a sports fan, so she was utterly shocked when she came to LA and heard what the average fan in the street was saying. Basically the girl was being tried in the court of public opinion all across the country, and for whatever reason - even though it was public knowledge that Bryant is an arrogant person and alpha male type - seemingly it never occurred to the vast majority of Los Angelinos that he was capable of doing such a thing...all because he can dunk a basketball with more flair than most. Well, she knows better, having studied the topic for a long, long time.
It was a ringing indictment of our society in many ways, and in particular with sports fans, and even more specifically, LA sports fans. Her whole purpose for the film was to bring attention to the fact that the women in these cases are the ones who are the victims, yet as soon as they open their mouths, they are victimized even moreso, and sometimes exponentially. Point is, it has been proven way too many times that it doesn't help matters to talk about it and try to prosecute. This is the sad truth in far too many cases. And it is obviously the wrong message to send, because it adds to the victims' natural desire to suppress the event/crime.
So even though a lot of posters on this site and others like to make frivolous jokes about this alleged rape and the victim, and how ty she allegedly was, this case is not unlike tens of thousands of others that will happen this year...and we'll only hear about maybe 5% of them because the women will decide not to report the rape for some of the very same reasons we witnessed with the Bryant case. Rape is a violent crime which demolishes the psyche of the victim. The emotional makeup of a rape victim can rarely ever regain its previous levels. It is a hideous act, and is not the least bit funny in any sense of the word.
I didn't intend to make this a social platform, but since this is a thread about Tim Duncan and his superlative play this year, I found it exceedingly sad that Mr. Bryant's questionable behavior still enters into discussions and continues to taint the landscape of a beautiful sport.
The reality is that Mr. Bryant was never tried in a court of law. However, his alleged victim was most certainly tried in a court of public opinion, and at least on this board, is still sitting on the stand.
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