Photo by David Shankbone — Gayle King at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

After the tragic and untimely death of Kobe Bryant, journalists struggled to find the best way to report the loss with sensitivity and pathos, while still reckoning with certain uncomfortable facts about Bryant’s personal life, particularly his arrest for sexual assault in 2003 and admission of marital infidelity.

Although the sexual assault charges were eventually dropped when the accuser declined to testify against the NBA star, Bryant’s public apology and its import took on a new meaning in the #metoo era and is worthy of quoting in full below:

“Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this 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 believe it is perfectly legitimate to include all the facts as we know them in any balanced assessment of Bryant’s life and legacy. He was a basketball player, not a bishop. Unlike a great many wealthy and powerful figures accused of sexual assault, he took a measure of personal responsibility in his public statement, and reached a substantial financial settlement with his accuser.

This does not at all absolve Bryant from blame, and it certainly will never erase a painful memory from the 19-year-old woman who saw her life turned upside down in the summer of 2003, but it does deserve mention in any (re)assessment of his character. Bryant did not try and hide from his past. His strong support of women in sports represented a form of atonement, and fatherhood of four daughters clearly had a humbling and sobering effect on the last fifteen years of his life.

This is also part of Kobe’s story.

However, within hours of Bryant’s death, Felicia Sonmez, a Washington Post reporter tweeted out a link to a 2016 Daily Beast story about Bryant’s rape case, incurring the immediate enmity and outrage of thousands on social media over the following several hours. Sonmez shortly thereafter shared an excerpt of some of the vitriol, publicly exposing the name and email address for some of the most obnoxious lowlifes who thought “cunt” passed for criticism.



The following day Sonmez was suspended by the Washington Post, and while the exact reasons were not made exactly clear, there was a general understanding from the Post editorial staff that her initial tweet was inappropriate, and perhaps a violation of the Washington Post’s rather vague social media policy.

Many journalists, including some of her Washington Post colleagues, pushed quickly for her reinstatement, arguing, as she did in a subsequent explanatory tweet, that journalists must often address uncomfortable and inconvenient truths.



The Washington Post Guild, Sonmez’s union, sent a letter urging the Post to reconsider the suspension, noting “[t]he loss of such a beloved figure, and of so many other lives, is a tragedy. But we believe it is our responsibility as a news organization to tell the public the whole truth as we know it — about figures and institutions both popular and unpopular, at moments timely and untimely.” Her colleague Erik Wemple rushed to the defense of Sonmez, saying the public relies on journalists “to provide warts-and-all look backs on the lives of influential people.”

However, Sonmez did not provide a “warts-and-all” look back on the life of Kobe Bryant. Her tweet, poorly timed, grossly insensitive, lacking a modicum of mature judgment, AND highlighting a competing news organization, was “warts” only.

Her editors did exactly the right thing to send a strong message with her suspension that timing, context and focusing on one’s particular area of expertise will generally produce the best work product in journalism, and allowing staff to run amok online will turn the news cycle inward and shift the focus to the writer, not the written word.

Sonmez’s inflammatory tweet, coming just a few hours after the deadly helicopter crash, was solely intended to provoke an angry response, and her feigned shock at the anger and hate such a tweet engendered, speaks volumes about the elite media’s frequent tone-deafness, coupled with their rapacious appetite for clicks and shares that underlies so many of these “hit and run” postings on social media.

There would be (and will be) many days to look back on the life and times of Kobe Bryant. The Washington Post’s journalists, to their credit and like most media thoughtfully covering the tragedy, cited the 2003 sexual assault allegation in its coverage.

The rape allegations were not being whitewashed or forgotten, merely put in the appropriate context in the hours immediately following his death, because the story at that moment in time was not a sexual assault, but a tragedy that was felt globally, far beyond the sports world.

For a political news reporter, like Sonmez, well-versed in the knowledge of the limitations of a medium such as Twitter to provide any semblance of balance or nuance, to throw out an incendiary bomb on Twitter and then hide under the protection of the First Amendment when thousands exercised their very same free speech rights to express their anger and frustration, helps explain why so many distrust and dislike the media.

It should be underscored that there is absolutely no place, anywhere for threats of violence or physical harm to a journalist doing their job. Only the weakest and most contemptible sort feels that a threat or foul language is an appropriate response to an article or a tweet.

I want to contrast the Sonmez incident with the recent interview Gayle King had with former WNBA star Lisa Leslie. In the context of a wide-ranging interview for CBS covering numerous topics, including Kobe Bryant, with whom Leslie had a close personal friendship, King asked Leslie, “It’s been said that his legacy is complicated because of a sexual assault charge which was dismissed in 2003, 2004. Is it complicated for you, as a woman, as a WNBA player?”

Leslie replied that it is “not complicated for me at all.” Leslie said that Bryant was not “the kind of person that would be (or) do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way.”

In the days that followed, King, like Sonmez, found herself subjected to misogynous, hateful and hurtful comments on social media and a chastened, frustrated King called out CBS for its self-serving promotion of the above soundbite that overshadowed the rest of her excellent interview.

A number of NBA stars, Snoop Dog, and even Bill Cosby piled on critically in response to Gayle King’s interview, but they all missed the main point.

King’s questioning of Leslie was not a “gotcha” hit job. She was not trying to destroy Kobe’s legacy, but like a responsible reporter, give it color.

King asked a reasonable question to someone who because of her profession, gender, skin color and relationship to Kobe Bryant was uniquely qualified to answer such questions and, it should be added, Leslie’s answer was equally thoughtful and reasonable.

In criticizing some of the media response to Kobe Bryant’s death, it’s important to distinguish between Sonmez stepping outside her job and Gayle King doing hers.

To suggest that one cannot comment or question Kobe Bryant’s complex legacy would be doing his life story a disservice.

What happened that night in 2003 is part of who Kobe Bryant was, but not all that he was.

HOW, WHEN, WHERE and WHY one asks these questions is what should matter most.

It is what separates Gayle King from Felicia Sonmez.