CBS denounces threats against anchor over Kobe Bryant story
09/02/2020
Washington (AFP)
The president of CBS News on Sunday denounced as "reprehensible" a comment by famed rapper Snoop Dogg that appeared to threaten a news anchor over an interview about late basketball star Kobe Bryant.
Bryant died, along with his daughter and seven other people, in a helicopter crash on January 26 in California. Since then, references to a 2003 sexual abuse allegation against him have drawn a furious reaction from fans.
Snoop Dogg's harangue on social media followed an interview that Gayle King, anchor of "CBS This Morning," had about Bryant with Lisa Leslie, a former star player in women's professional basketball.
In it, King seemed to press Leslie about the 2003 case, while Leslie repeatedly portrayed her friend as someone who "was never like that" and who would "never do something to violate a woman."
A seething Snoop Dogg then posted an obscenity-laced video online, calling King a "funky dog-head bitch."
He added, ominously, "Respect the family and back off, bitch, before we come and get you."
CBS President Susan Zirinsky called the remarks "reprehensible," adding in a statement to The Hill news website, "We fully support Gayle King and her integrity as a journalist."
- Multiple death threats -
In the wake of the exchange, King has received multiple death threats, according to her good friend, media mega-star Oprah Winfrey.
"She is not doing well," Winfrey said Friday on NBC, adding, "She has now death threats, and now has to travel with security, and she's feeling very much attacked."
Also coming to King's defense was former national security adviser Susan Rice, who bluntly warned Snoop Dogg in a tweet to "back the fuck off," adding, "You come for @GayleKing, you come against an army. You will lose, and it won't be pretty."
King herself posted two videos saying the interview had been edited in a way that misrepresented its actual tone.
"I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw, I would be extremely angry with me too," she said in one video. "I am mortified. I'm embarrassed and I am very angry."
The video, she went on, was "totally taken out of context."
- A fuller interview -
King said that in the full interview she had spent much more time talking about Bryant's career, his mentorship of younger people and his sense of humor.
A statement from CBS appeared to concede problems in the editing process.
"Gayle conducted a thoughtful, wide-ranging interview," it said. "We are addressing the internal process that led to this, and changes have already been made."
Earlier, the Washington Post briefly suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez after she posted a link, the day of Bryant's death, that called attention to the 2003 allegations.
She said she received thousands of angry emails, including death threats.
Senior editors at the Post told her she had shown poor judgment, though other journalists at the Post rallied around her.
Bryant was arrested in 2003 after a woman in Colorado said he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room there.
He insisted he had believed the encounter was consensual, but later reached an undisclosed settlement with the accuser.
Disney heiress says Kobe Bryant 'was not a god' in lengthy Twitter thread about rape allegations
The allegations never made it to trial, and though Bryant said the sex was consensual, he eventually apologized to his accuser, The New York Times reported.
Disney said Bryant could be mourned but said people should not "deify him because he was not a god."
Disney heiress Abigail Disney addressed the rape allegations against late NBA star Kobe Bryant in a 24-tweet thread on Saturday that urged people to avoid turning Bryant into a god.
The 60-year-old, who is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney — a cofounder of the Walt Disney Company — had in a tweet January 29 shared an op-ed from the Washington Post about allegations Bryant faced some 17 years ago, writing "The man was a rapist. Deal with it."
On February 1, the Disney heiress, who has a net worth of over $120 million, doubled down on her previous statement, offering new commentary on Bryant, who died January 26 in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California.
"OK, time to bite the bullet and say something," Disney said when she began her Twitter thread early Saturday morning. "If you don't like it, just stop following. First of all, yes, it IS my business because I'm a woman who has herself been assaulted and spent my life knowing, loving and feeling for women for whom it's been so much worse."
—Abigail Disney (@abigaildisney) February 1, 2020
At the onset of the thread, Disney offered praise for Bryant amid her discussion of the rape allegations, noting that a person can do both good and bad things in their lifetime. "I mourn Kobe too," she wrote. "He went on to be a man who seemed genuinely to want to do good. The face[sic] that he raped someone does not change any of these other facts."
As The New York Times reported, the allegations stem from Bryant's 2003 a trip to Colorado for an operation on his knee. Byrant reportedly asked a concierge at the spa where he was staying for a private tour. Following the tour, he invited her to his room where they began kissing. Bryant had said what followed was consensual sex, though his accuser said she was raped.
Court documents revealed the woman had bruises on her neck and tears on her vaginal wall, The New York Times reported. While the case never went to trial, reportedly over the accusers' refusal to testify, a lawsuit between Bryant and the accuser resulted in an undisclosed settlement.
Bryant later apologized to his accuser.
"Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual," he said in a statement, "I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did."
Disney went on to compare the allegations against Bryant to a drunk driver killing a person. "Does his lack of intention absolve him of responsibility for the death?," Disney asked. "If he said he wasn't that drunk or didn't know he was drunk, or didn't mean to kill the person, or is really really really sorry, does any of this absolve him?"
"Of course not," she added in the next tweet.
Disney's final takeaway: don't worship the NBA star.
"So yes, we should mourn him," Disney said. "We should mourn his daughter and his family and all the other lives lost on the helicopter. It was horrible. But don't deify him because he was not a god. That's all. Just don't deify him".
There has been a flood of discourse since Bryant's death over whether his 2003 rape allegations should be revisited as the world mourns the basketball star's tragic death. The Washington Post received backlash when it suspended a reporter for sharing an article about the 2003 case on Twitter after Bryant's death. The DC newspaper would later walk back its decision to suspend the reporter, saying her tweets did not violate WaPo policy. Still, it said her tweets were "ill-timed."
The reactions to Disney's two-dozen tweets were largely negative.
"Breaking: bored heiress of a multimedia empire has nothing better to do on a Wednesday because her life is completely empty & meaningless," one Twitter user said in a tweet that was retweeted more than 120 times.
—michelle Polite (@michellePolit10) February 1, 2020
—Splash (@flashazoid) February 1, 2020
Not all of the reactions to Disney's thread were negative, however.
"What a thoughtful thread," one person tweeted. "Thank you for writing it. I have seen the way that fierce emotional identification and defense of abusive behavior can happen with sports figures."
Abigail Disney did not return Business Insider's request for comment.
Opinion: We Have To Tell The Whole Truth About Kobe Bryant
We still struggle to tell fully human stories about the people we love — only heroes’ journeys or villains’ defeats.
THE OTHER FOUR LETTER WORD; RAPE
LINKING A TWEET TO THIS STORY GOT A WAPO REPORTER SUSPENDED
Jill Filipovic BuzzFeed Contributor
Posted on January 27, 2020,
Frederic J. Brown / Getty Images
Fans gather to mourn Kobe Bryant at a mural near the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
The death of a celebrity leaves its mark even on distant admirers. We live in a cynical culture, and yet the young, beautiful, talented, and famous still thrill us. They remind us we’re still optimistic, still capable of being awed. Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest athletes in the world, someone whose beauty and grace and power on the court was, even for total laypeople like me, still so very obvious and so very stunning. He was only 41, a dedicated father, a beloved son, a caring husband, a good friend. The eight people who died with him, including three young girls — Payton Chester, Alyssa Altobelli, and Bryant’s own daughter Gianna — had so much promise and were beloved by so many people. They are all grieving today, and my heart hurts for all of them.
And also.
You know the and also, don’t you? That Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a woman? My heart hurts for her too.
It’s uncomfortable to raise the worst thing someone has ever done when that someone dies, especially when they are beloved. And I suppose it matters I write this as someone who thinks that very, very few of us are all good or all bad; few of us are saintly, even fewer irredeemable. We can admire aspects of a person’s talent without erasing the ways they also did irreparable damage. We can be horrified and angry about what someone did without writing them off as worthless, without seeing them go away — to jail, to the grave — and saying “good riddance.”
But is it an affront to bring up the bad things someone did, so soon after they die, when their loved ones and their admirers are still grieving? How bad do those bad things have to be to merit immediate mention? How good do the good things have to be to justify silencing the rest? (Do we imagine, for example, that when Harvey Weinstein dies, his talents and wonderful movies will merit courteous silence on his alleged sexual abuses?)
How do you balance the pain that raising sexual assault allegations will cause family and fans against the pain felt by so many survivors of sexual violence who are again watching a beloved man being internationally lauded, the inconvenient parts of his story — the woman who says he raped her — politely excised?
These are not easy questions. There is no scale to weigh them on.
Kobe’s extraordinary ability is key to his story. And it is not the whole story. Out of some mislaid definition of respect, we are so excellent at sidelining the inconvenient parts — at least when the inconvenient parts are women, and the one who is inconvenienced is a man we would prefer to keep admiring without complication.
The inconvenient part of Kobe’s story was a teenager, 19 years old. She worked at a hotel where Kobe stayed. The details are all out there if you want to know them.
Kobe initially told the police nothing happened. Then when the police told him they had blood and semen evidence, he said, well, ok, something did happen, but it was consensual.
The woman had a bruise on her neck. She had genital injuries and vaginal tears consistent with trauma. Her underwear and a T-shirt of Kobe’s were stained with her blood.
The full weight of Kobe Bryant’s money, power, and influence came down on her. His lawyers suggested she was sexually promiscuous. One psychology professor studied the coverage of the case and found that more than 40% of news stories questioned the truthfulness of the woman’s account; only 7.7% questioned Kobe’s honesty.
The young woman — the teenager — settled out of court. As part of the agreement, Kobe apologized.
We like to think of celebrity-watching as an escape from real life, but it’s more of a mirror. The way we bestow celebrity status reflects what we value; so too does where and how and why we deem celebrities good or bad or admirable or deplorable. The Kobe Bryant rape case reflected something very ugly back at us, and the fact that we just don’t know what to do with that information upon his death shows that, yes, we have changed — at least editors and anchors and reporters and commentators are wringing their hands about how to deal with it.
But we are still very much in flux. We still don’t know how to tell human stories when a life ends, only heroes’ journeys or villains’ defeats. A lot of people want Kobe to be an uncomplicated luminary, a great man without inconvenient addendums, and yet here is the inconvenient shadow of a female form darkening the background.
Maybe the stories we tell about our culture’s most resonant figures should strive to be true, for better or worse.
Maybe the reason we care about Kobe Bryant dying is because his life was never just about Kobe Bryant, but about all of the aspirations and values we pinned onto him, and it is for exactly that reason that there is no disrespect or invasion of privacy in insisting that the inconvenient parts live alongside the admirable ones, that the ugly is a neighbor to the exquisite.
People are grieving for a much-admired man, for too many lives cut short, for promise snuffed out, and for families in pain. Others — especially those whose lives have been impacted by sexual violence — may be grieving in another direction, painfully reminded of all the ways women are erased so great men may be sanctified. We can make space for both experiences without shouting each other down or suggesting that one set of emotions has less of a right to be expressed than another does.
That same work of compassion also calls on us to remember that no person is an island. All our lives leave ripples. Some lives are tsunamis. Compassion is not summarizing the beauty of the wave; it’s picking through the wreckage, reckoning with who was hurt.
Awe without honesty isn’t respect; it’s myth. Admiration of only the easy parts is fanaticism, not reverence. And if we want a world in which our stories are more honest than the heroes-and-villains framework allows, then we have to start by telling the whole truth.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A version of this article was originally published in her newsletter.
THE RESULT OF A TWEET LINKING TO THIS A WAPO REPORTER WAS SUSPENDED THOUGHT WAPO BELIEVED IN REPORTING FACTS
Washington Post/YouTube USA Today/YouTube (Fair Use) Kris Seavers
Tiffanie Drayton— 2020-01-27 03:08 pm
Abigail Disney spoke out about Bryant's rape allegations
Saturday. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Refinery29
Disney heiress Abigail Disney spoke out in two-dozen tweets Saturday about the late Kobe Bryant's 2003 rape allegations.
Disney heiress Abigail Disney spoke out in two-dozen tweets Saturday about the late Kobe Bryant's 2003 rape allegations.
The allegations never made it to trial, and though Bryant said the sex was consensual, he eventually apologized to his accuser, The New York Times reported.
Disney said Bryant could be mourned but said people should not "deify him because he was not a god."
Disney heiress Abigail Disney addressed the rape allegations against late NBA star Kobe Bryant in a 24-tweet thread on Saturday that urged people to avoid turning Bryant into a god.
The 60-year-old, who is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney — a cofounder of the Walt Disney Company — had in a tweet January 29 shared an op-ed from the Washington Post about allegations Bryant faced some 17 years ago, writing "The man was a rapist. Deal with it."
On February 1, the Disney heiress, who has a net worth of over $120 million, doubled down on her previous statement, offering new commentary on Bryant, who died January 26 in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California.
"OK, time to bite the bullet and say something," Disney said when she began her Twitter thread early Saturday morning. "If you don't like it, just stop following. First of all, yes, it IS my business because I'm a woman who has herself been assaulted and spent my life knowing, loving and feeling for women for whom it's been so much worse."
—Abigail Disney (@abigaildisney) February 1, 2020
At the onset of the thread, Disney offered praise for Bryant amid her discussion of the rape allegations, noting that a person can do both good and bad things in their lifetime. "I mourn Kobe too," she wrote. "He went on to be a man who seemed genuinely to want to do good. The face[sic] that he raped someone does not change any of these other facts."
As The New York Times reported, the allegations stem from Bryant's 2003 a trip to Colorado for an operation on his knee. Byrant reportedly asked a concierge at the spa where he was staying for a private tour. Following the tour, he invited her to his room where they began kissing. Bryant had said what followed was consensual sex, though his accuser said she was raped.
Court documents revealed the woman had bruises on her neck and tears on her vaginal wall, The New York Times reported. While the case never went to trial, reportedly over the accusers' refusal to testify, a lawsuit between Bryant and the accuser resulted in an undisclosed settlement.
Bryant later apologized to his accuser.
"Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual," he said in a statement, "I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did."
Disney went on to compare the allegations against Bryant to a drunk driver killing a person. "Does his lack of intention absolve him of responsibility for the death?," Disney asked. "If he said he wasn't that drunk or didn't know he was drunk, or didn't mean to kill the person, or is really really really sorry, does any of this absolve him?"
"Of course not," she added in the next tweet.
Disney's final takeaway: don't worship the NBA star.
"So yes, we should mourn him," Disney said. "We should mourn his daughter and his family and all the other lives lost on the helicopter. It was horrible. But don't deify him because he was not a god. That's all. Just don't deify him".
There has been a flood of discourse since Bryant's death over whether his 2003 rape allegations should be revisited as the world mourns the basketball star's tragic death. The Washington Post received backlash when it suspended a reporter for sharing an article about the 2003 case on Twitter after Bryant's death. The DC newspaper would later walk back its decision to suspend the reporter, saying her tweets did not violate WaPo policy. Still, it said her tweets were "ill-timed."
The reactions to Disney's two-dozen tweets were largely negative.
"Breaking: bored heiress of a multimedia empire has nothing better to do on a Wednesday because her life is completely empty & meaningless," one Twitter user said in a tweet that was retweeted more than 120 times.
—michelle Polite (@michellePolit10) February 1, 2020
—Splash (@flashazoid) February 1, 2020
Not all of the reactions to Disney's thread were negative, however.
"What a thoughtful thread," one person tweeted. "Thank you for writing it. I have seen the way that fierce emotional identification and defense of abusive behavior can happen with sports figures."
Abigail Disney did not return Business Insider's request for comment.
Opinion: We Have To Tell The Whole Truth About Kobe Bryant
We still struggle to tell fully human stories about the people we love — only heroes’ journeys or villains’ defeats.
THE OTHER FOUR LETTER WORD; RAPE
LINKING A TWEET TO THIS STORY GOT A WAPO REPORTER SUSPENDED
Jill Filipovic BuzzFeed Contributor
Posted on January 27, 2020,
Frederic J. Brown / Getty Images
Fans gather to mourn Kobe Bryant at a mural near the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
The death of a celebrity leaves its mark even on distant admirers. We live in a cynical culture, and yet the young, beautiful, talented, and famous still thrill us. They remind us we’re still optimistic, still capable of being awed. Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest athletes in the world, someone whose beauty and grace and power on the court was, even for total laypeople like me, still so very obvious and so very stunning. He was only 41, a dedicated father, a beloved son, a caring husband, a good friend. The eight people who died with him, including three young girls — Payton Chester, Alyssa Altobelli, and Bryant’s own daughter Gianna — had so much promise and were beloved by so many people. They are all grieving today, and my heart hurts for all of them.
And also.
You know the and also, don’t you? That Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a woman? My heart hurts for her too.
It’s uncomfortable to raise the worst thing someone has ever done when that someone dies, especially when they are beloved. And I suppose it matters I write this as someone who thinks that very, very few of us are all good or all bad; few of us are saintly, even fewer irredeemable. We can admire aspects of a person’s talent without erasing the ways they also did irreparable damage. We can be horrified and angry about what someone did without writing them off as worthless, without seeing them go away — to jail, to the grave — and saying “good riddance.”
But is it an affront to bring up the bad things someone did, so soon after they die, when their loved ones and their admirers are still grieving? How bad do those bad things have to be to merit immediate mention? How good do the good things have to be to justify silencing the rest? (Do we imagine, for example, that when Harvey Weinstein dies, his talents and wonderful movies will merit courteous silence on his alleged sexual abuses?)
How do you balance the pain that raising sexual assault allegations will cause family and fans against the pain felt by so many survivors of sexual violence who are again watching a beloved man being internationally lauded, the inconvenient parts of his story — the woman who says he raped her — politely excised?
These are not easy questions. There is no scale to weigh them on.
Kobe’s extraordinary ability is key to his story. And it is not the whole story. Out of some mislaid definition of respect, we are so excellent at sidelining the inconvenient parts — at least when the inconvenient parts are women, and the one who is inconvenienced is a man we would prefer to keep admiring without complication.
The inconvenient part of Kobe’s story was a teenager, 19 years old. She worked at a hotel where Kobe stayed. The details are all out there if you want to know them.
Kobe initially told the police nothing happened. Then when the police told him they had blood and semen evidence, he said, well, ok, something did happen, but it was consensual.
The woman had a bruise on her neck. She had genital injuries and vaginal tears consistent with trauma. Her underwear and a T-shirt of Kobe’s were stained with her blood.
The full weight of Kobe Bryant’s money, power, and influence came down on her. His lawyers suggested she was sexually promiscuous. One psychology professor studied the coverage of the case and found that more than 40% of news stories questioned the truthfulness of the woman’s account; only 7.7% questioned Kobe’s honesty.
The young woman — the teenager — settled out of court. As part of the agreement, Kobe apologized.
We like to think of celebrity-watching as an escape from real life, but it’s more of a mirror. The way we bestow celebrity status reflects what we value; so too does where and how and why we deem celebrities good or bad or admirable or deplorable. The Kobe Bryant rape case reflected something very ugly back at us, and the fact that we just don’t know what to do with that information upon his death shows that, yes, we have changed — at least editors and anchors and reporters and commentators are wringing their hands about how to deal with it.
But we are still very much in flux. We still don’t know how to tell human stories when a life ends, only heroes’ journeys or villains’ defeats. A lot of people want Kobe to be an uncomplicated luminary, a great man without inconvenient addendums, and yet here is the inconvenient shadow of a female form darkening the background.
Maybe the stories we tell about our culture’s most resonant figures should strive to be true, for better or worse.
Maybe the reason we care about Kobe Bryant dying is because his life was never just about Kobe Bryant, but about all of the aspirations and values we pinned onto him, and it is for exactly that reason that there is no disrespect or invasion of privacy in insisting that the inconvenient parts live alongside the admirable ones, that the ugly is a neighbor to the exquisite.
People are grieving for a much-admired man, for too many lives cut short, for promise snuffed out, and for families in pain. Others — especially those whose lives have been impacted by sexual violence — may be grieving in another direction, painfully reminded of all the ways women are erased so great men may be sanctified. We can make space for both experiences without shouting each other down or suggesting that one set of emotions has less of a right to be expressed than another does.
That same work of compassion also calls on us to remember that no person is an island. All our lives leave ripples. Some lives are tsunamis. Compassion is not summarizing the beauty of the wave; it’s picking through the wreckage, reckoning with who was hurt.
Awe without honesty isn’t respect; it’s myth. Admiration of only the easy parts is fanaticism, not reverence. And if we want a world in which our stories are more honest than the heroes-and-villains framework allows, then we have to start by telling the whole truth.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A version of this article was originally published in her newsletter.
THE RESULT OF A TWEET LINKING TO THIS A WAPO REPORTER WAS SUSPENDED THOUGHT WAPO BELIEVED IN REPORTING FACTS
Washington Post reporter suspended amid backlash over Kobe Bryant tweet
She says she received death threats.
Tiffanie Drayton— 2020-01-27 03:08 pm
A Washington Post reporter has been suspended after she shared a link to a story about allegations of rape against Kobe Bryant hours after his death.
In a since-deleted tweet, Felicia Sonmez’s—who covers politics for the Post—shared a story published by The Daily Beast titled “Kobe Bryant’s disturbing rape case,” which details allegations made against the basketball legend in 2003. The tweet came only hours after Bryant’s untimely death, prompting outrage and backlash from his fans.
“Well, THAT was eye-opening. To the 10,000 people (literally) who have commented and emailed me with abuse and death threats, please take a moment and read the story—which was written 3+ years ago, and not by me. Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality,” Sonmez tweeted after receiving an outpouring of hate mail.
Hey @feliciasonmez you must have accidentally deleted your terrible, attention-seeking, victim-claiming tweets. Don't worry, I kept them for you. pic.twitter.com/lByFGd36Gs— Today in Mavs Facebook (@Mavs_Facebook) January 27, 2020
“That folks are responding with rage and threats toward me (someone who didn’t even write the piece but found it well-reported) speaks volumes about the pressure people come under to stay silent in these cases,” she continued in a follow-up tweet.
Sonmez deleted all of the tweets amid the backlash but not before they were captured in screenshots and shared with criticisms of the reporter’s timing.
Tracy Grant, the Washington Post’s managing editor, told the Daily Mail that Sonmez’s tweets violated the newsroom’s social media policy.
“The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues,” she reportedly said.
Initially, reports attributed Sonmez’s suspension from Post to the tweets about Bryant, but it was later reported that she was reprimanded for outing the people who trolled her via email.
“A person who works at the Washington Post says @feliciasonmez was NOT suspended for linking to the Daily Beast story on Twitter. Her suspension was related to a follow up tweet that contained a screen shot of her work email inbox, which revealed full names of emailers,” reporter Matthew Keys said.
Users on Twitter continue to criticize the political reporter, with many flat out telling her “bye Felicia” and using the hashtag #FireFeliciaSonmez.
— Jim L (@username_Jim_L) January 26, 2020
“@washingtonpost you should #firefeliciasonmez for this classless and heartless post with the passing of an iconic superstar literally HOURS after a horrific crash that also killed his daughter and 7 other along with them,” one user wrote.
@washingtonpost you should #firefeliciasonmez for this classless and heartless post with the passing of an iconic superstar literally HOURS after a horrific crash that also killed his daughter and 7 other along with them. #firefeliciasonmez— Cassidy Riley (@cassidyriley) January 26, 2020
Felicia Sonmez in 3 tweets this morning successfully united the country for a day. Dems, Reps, conservatives, liberals, moderates.— TheRealDegen (@TheRealDegen) January 27, 2020
All she had to do was spit on the memory of a world icon just a couple hours after his death & the death of his daughter.#FireFeliciaSonmez
Bryant died in a helicopter crash on Sunday that also claimed the lives of his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and eight others on board.
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