The Kobe Case: From the Perspective of the Valley Man Who Was Hired to Help Send Him to Prison

Kobe Bryant was being unfairly accused of rape – that’s what Scottsdale’s Dr. Steven Pitt thought from the very start. And he wasn’t alone. Most sports fans agreed that the Los Angeles Lakers star was one of the most unlikely suspects for such a violent act. He had long been considered one of America’s most revered athletes – a squeaky Mr. Clean who seemingly rejected the NBA’s loose sex image; a family man with a new baby; a five-time All-Star who at 25 already owned three championship rings; a guy respected enough to be the pitchman for some of America’s largest companies.

But Dr. Pitt, a Lakers fan since his college classmate, Magic Johnson, joined the team, wasn’t simply watching the case unfold from the sidelines. As a noted forensic psychiatrist, he also was watching it through the eyes of a professional who has seen more than his share of horrible human behavior.

And he found it very hard to believe that the unblemished sports hero was guilty. He wondered if this wasn’t just a star-struck young woman trying to extort a superstar. And as the case unfolded, as the media got one leak after another that portrayed the woman as a harlot and monster, his mind didn’t change.

A lot was at stake in this high-profile case. If this were all a lie, a young woman was destroying the career of one of the best basketball players on the planet. If it wasn’t, Kobe Bryant was guilty of a violent crime that could send him to prison for life.

“My information was coming through the media, but I like to think I can ferret through that pretty well,” Dr. Pitt says over breakfast one morning on the patio of Café Ted in Scottsdale.

The media reports were about the only thing anyone had, since the district judge in Colorado had slapped a gag order on both the defense and the prosecution. But, of course, for the media – both those who cling to journalistic ethics and those who don’t – a gag order is like a red flag waved before a bull. It only heightened the competition for something to report each day.

And what they universally reported each day were attacks on the accuser. Some in the tabloid press even went so far as to call her a liar and a cheat. Meanwhile, Bryant was defended and extolled by many, including fans in Houston who called out to him during a game: “She deserved it.”

To defend himself, Bryant assembled a group of high-powered and skillful attorneys that the media labeled “Team Kobe,” as though this were just another game.

So, when Scottsdale’s Dr. Pitt got a call from the district attorney’s office that was prosecuting the case, he was understandably hesitant.
Nonetheless, he assembled a team of local colleagues (Dr. Erin Spiers and Dr. Joel Dvoskin, both of whom are from Arizona and also worked with Pitt on the “psychiatric autopsies” in the Columbine case) and agreed to review the file. He didn’t promise anything, though.

Using a successful technique he’s used for years, they independently studied the evidence. Dr. Spiers remembers her skepticism when she got the file: “It’s not looking good for this girl, but then I always say, I don’t know, because I just have the media version.”

“At the beginning, I’d probably have been the defendant’s best witness,” Dr. Pitt says now. So, he’s still amazed at what he found while reading the thousands of pages of legal documents. “This guy is no prince, and he has his share of issues,” Dr. Pitt says. “But, to be honest, she’s no princess.”

He notes he was privy to information that the media has never had; to evidence that told a very different story than the one America had consumed on television and in print back in 2003 and 2004; and to insights that contradicted the “woodchipper” assault leveled on the young woman’s credibility.

In the end, the weight of evidence completely turned Pitt around. “I did a 180-degree turn,” he says. “I was flabbergasted. I was just blown away.”

And then he realized that his two colleagues had independently reached the exact same conclusion – this story was being horribly distorted in the media.

As it turns out, though, this story will never unfold in a criminal courtroom, because Kobe Bryant is no longer facing criminal charges. The alleged victim – who was hounded by the media and faced death threats from crazed Bryant fans – stopped cooperating with authorities, and last fall prosecutors dropped the charges. So, Bryant can never be charged with this crime again, and he no longer faces a prison sentence. At press time, Bryant had agreed in principle to a settlement in the civil suit against him.

In the minds of many, the civil case proved that she was just after his money all along, and prosecutors were duped into bringing rape charges because the accused was a national celebrity. On the other hand, some believe a rapist escaped a prison sentence because he was a celebrity who could afford stellar attorneys and had the resources to badger his alleged victim into giving up. They say that the only thing it’ll cost him is some money and maybe a chink in his reputation.

Whichever is true, the implications go far beyond one superstar and one teenager, because in the course of pre-trial motions and rulings, sexual assault experts say Colorado’s tough Rape Shield Law was trashed, and future rape victims were undoubtedly scared off.

Dr. Steven Pitt finds that particularly sad. “I had every confidence that if they went to trial, there would be no doubt in anybody’s mind why prosecutors brought these charges,” he says. “It was a no-brainer.”

It all started about 4 p.m. on June 30, 2003, when a travel agent called the Cordillera Lodge & Spa in Eagle, Colorado, to reserve three rooms under the name of “Javier Rodriquez.”

The front-desk clerk – a 19-year-old woman who’d worked at the hotel just 18 months – was told the name was just a cover for Kobe Bryant. She’d been scheduled to work the 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift that day, but hadn’t arrived until 2 p.m. – first claiming she’d had car trouble, but later admitting that she’d just overslept. She decided to stay late to make up the hours, and because she was “excited to meet Kobe Bryant.”

According to her initial interview with police, she said Bryant and two bodyguards showed up around 9:30 p.m. and she escorted them all to Bryant’s room: Number 235. The guards looked it over to be sure it was secure, and while they were out of ear-shot, she says Bryant asked if she’d come back in 15 minutes and give him a tour of the hotel. She asked him for an autograph, and he told her he’d give her one if she came back for the tour.

She then took the bodyguards to their rooms, went back to her post, and waited for a few minutes. Then she went to Bryant’s room, using a back way because she said she’d sensed that Bryant didn’t want his bodyguards knowing about the arrangement. For the next 15 minutes, she took him to see the spa, the exercise room, and the outdoor pool and Jacuzzi – where they were observed by the bellman and a couple of hotel guests – before returning to his room. She remembered his flirting with her – asking about a boyfriend, saying he liked how she dressed – and she remembered flirting back and laughing at his jokes.
Back in the room, they talked for a while, and when he asked her for a hug, she readily gave him one. “He started kissing me, and I let him kiss me,” she admitted. “I was kissing him back.” But she said, when he took off his pants, she backed up and tried to leave. “And that is when he started to choke me.”

That’s also when she said he changed. “When he started groping me, he wasn’t so nice anymore,” she told officers. “His voice got deeper and more stern and he became more rough with me. When he first started kissing me, it was all really soft, and he was being really nice, and then he just… his actions became, he jerked me around and he was squeezing me….”

She told authorities that he had bent her over a chair, put one hand around her neck and raped her from behind – ignoring her pleas to stop. She said she knew he heard her say “no” because “every time I said ‘no’ he tightened his hold.”

“I was scared that he was going to choke me ’til… like I couldn’t breathe, or that he would hit me,” she said.

Three or four times, she claimed, he asked her with his face close to hers, “You’re not gonna tell anybody, right?” She said she knew it wasn’t a question but a command, and each time she promised to stay quiet.

He was hurting her, she said, both inside and outside, and she started to cry. He told her to compose herself before she left, telling her a final time to not tell anyone. There was no autograph. (She originally told police that Bryant had her wash her face before she left the room, but later admitted that had never happened.)

Court TV reported that she appeared in the lobby in “shock, a stupor.” Her friend, the bellman, could tell that something was wrong, and walked her to her car. He says her first words were: “He choked me.” She broke down and they spent a half-hour in the parking lot where, between tears, she told the bellman what had happened. He said he was so concerned about her state of mind, that he followed her on the 20-minute drive to her home. Then he went home and woke up his dad to tell him what had happened.

At home, the teenager said she called her on-again-off-again boyfriend and told him what had happened, but by then, had decided not to say anything to police. He urged her to tell her parents and go to the police, reiterating that plan in a call the next morning.

She finally agreed, called her mother at work, and asked her to come home. That afternoon, they went to the police, and she underwent a rape examination. Meanwhile, police started staking out Kobe Bryant at the Colorado resort.

When police approached Bryant in the parking lot of the spa the next day, here’s what he said: “I was with a lady who showed me around, yes. Did she say I did something to her?”

Officers asked what had happened, and he said: “She showed me around the pool… we went to my room, she showed me the back view where the bears come up to the window… we shot the shit and that was it.”

“Did anything happen in the room?” a detective asked.

“Like what?” Bryant asked.

“Uh, did you guys hug or kiss?”

“No.”

“Nothing like that happened?”

“No.”

“OK, um, I’ll be blunt and ask you, did you have sexual intercourse with her?”

“No.”

It’s then they tell him she underwent an exam and is alleging what they called “unconsensual intercourse.”

Bryant is noticeably upset at this point, and the officer continues: “Hang on, I understand you have every right to be upset, OK, but, you know, but, I’m giving you an opportunity to tell the truth if something did happen, because I am gonna tell you right now, um, we’re gonna find out.”

Bryant then tries to ask, “So, what happens now?” but the officers say they want to explain the situation before answering any questions. Then Bryant says, “Is there any way I can settle this, whatever it is?…” He says his wife would be “infuriated” if she found out anyone had made any type of allegation against him.

And then, according to a surreptitious tape recording of the conservation made by one of the officers, this occurs:
“I understand your concerns and frustration,” one officer says to him, playing the “buddy role” that usually gets suspects to open up. “I need to find out if this actually happened. You know, for all that happened, I mean, it could have been a complete come-on. I mean… she could have been leading things on or whatever.”

Bryant answers: “OK, so whatever, all right, but, um… what if this scenario…” and then he is so flustered (the tape only notes there are voices on top of one another) that an officer says, “Kobe, Kobe, Kobe, hey, Kobe, calm down here a sec.”

The officers stress there’s physical evidence. “Just be straight up, we’re not gonna tell your wife or anything like that. Did you have sexual intercourse with her?”

Bryant answers, “Um, this is what I need to know, cause, uh, I did have sexual intercourse with her.” Then he stresses that it was “totally consensual.”

He tells officers she was the one who began the kissing, yes, some hugging, too. She is the one who bent herself over the back of the chair, but he insisted she never said “no.” As the conversation went on, he elaborates, claiming she played with his penis, then saying she gave him a blowjob – and later adding she told him from the time she saw him she wanted to have sex with him.

“What does she want, what does she want?” he asked the officers. “I don’t think she wants anything,” the detective answered. “Are you kidding me?” Bryant responds. “What are you willing to give her?” another detective asks. “She has to want something,” Bryant keeps repeating, eventually saying she “must be trying to get money or something.” When asked if he’d pay, he said, “I got to. I got to. I got to. I’m in a worst fucking situation.”

Later, in obvious distress, he tells the officers, “I swear on my life, I did not, I did not sexually assault her in no kind of way whatsoever.”
One detective eventually lays it out: “I completely agree with you, it was consensual up to the point of the hugging and kissing issue, I agree, completely consensual. I have no issues with that whatsoever… what I’m skeptical on is that I don’t know how consensual the sexual intercourse was.”

Bryant never responds to that statement. But he does finally admit that he has a “frequent” friend named Michelle that his wife doesn’t know about, and he has sex with her the same way he did with the resort clerk.

The officers ask him to voluntarily take a male sexual-assault examination (one officer notes he already has a court order demanding the test) and Bryant agrees to go to a nearby hospital.

Time magazine would later ask the question: “Were His Pals Expecting Trouble?” The national magazine recounted the testimony of an undercover detective who described the first contact with the star and his bodyguard, claiming the bodyguard’s initial comment was, “If this is what I think it is, I don’t want to be involved.”

Bryant’s defense attorneys, considered to be among the best in Colorado, called the bodyguard statement “a complete lie,” but courtroom observers fully expected the prosecutors to use it to show that Kobe Bryant’s entourage “knew about the sexual encounter, and that he was expecting trouble,” Time reported.

Millions of words have been written about this case since police gathered those initial statements. Some of the tabloids focused on shattering the young woman’s reputation and painting Bryant as the victim of false charges, while others, notably Sports Illustrated, went out of their way to be fair and seek answers on both sides.

But for Dr. Pitt and Dr. Spiers, the truth of the matter was found in those first spoken words.

As he reviewed their statements – listening to the audiotape of Bryant’s first encounter with the officers; seeing the video tape of the accuser’s initial interview – he saw many clues that pointed toward what he believes really happened that night.

“Her story has the ring of truth,” he says, primarily because it is absent of any self-serving information. “She admits to things that are not beneficial to her – the consensual embrace and kiss – that raises the truthfulness level.”

“She really did not present herself well,” Dr. Spiers adds. “If you were making a false allegation of rape, you would not admit so many things – you were star-struck, flirting, excited, kissing – she conceded several things that didn’t look good for her.”

In addition, Dr. Pitt notes, if it really had been consensual sex, Bryant would have owned up to it from the beginning. “But his story starts out with deny, deny, deny. Then, when the police put the screws to him, he changes his story.”

Even Bryant giving the excuse that he wouldn’t want to admit anything because he was married doesn’t hold up as the interview progresses, Dr. Pitt and his colleagues say. It almost appears that he could think of no other answer than denial until officers suggested it might have been consensual.

“The interview reeks of ‘how much money do I have to throw at this to make it go away?'” Dr. Pitt says. Or, as Dr. Spiers says, “His demeanor was self-serving.”

They both say you cannot come away from hearing that tape believing this is an innocent guy. Just as they both say you can’t come away from seeing her initial videotaped interview with police and believe she was making this up.

And it always bothered Dr. Spiers about the autograph. “He’d promised her an autograph, so if they’d had a consensual experience, there would have been no reason she left in a rush and not gotten the autograph.” (Police also wondered about the autograph. Bryant told them that he intended to see her again the next day and give her an autograph then.)

“It’s so mind-blowing to see what’s on TV and what’s in the case file,” Dr. Spiers says. “It was excruciatingly frustrating to watch the case in the media – it was horrifying.”

On March 25, 2004, the alleged victim’s mother wrote an anguished letter to the court, begging for a speedy trial. She wanted the judge, Terry Ruckriegle, to understand “the reality of my daughter’s life.”
By then, three people had been arrested for threatening to kill her daughter. “She has received literally hundreds of death threats on the phone, in the mail and e-mail,” the mother wrote. “In addition, she’s received thousands of obscene messages. We are constantly worried about her safety.”

She recounted how her daughter had lived in four different states during the past six months. “She is followed everywhere by the defense and the media,” her mother charged. “The defense begins to question everyone she meets. The media reveals her location. Her safety is at risk, and she has to move again. She can’t live at home, she can’t live with relatives, she can’t go to school or talk to her friends.

“No one else involved in this case has had to make the life changes and compromises that my daughter has had to make, and will need to continue to make, until this case is over,” her mother added. “Even the defendant is able to continue living in his home and continue with his employment.”

In fact, during this time, Bryant signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the Lakers and took the team to the NBA finals.

“My daughter has plans for the future,” her mother concluded. “She wants to continue her education. However, her life is on hold, and her safety is in jeopardy until this case is over.”

Some say the girl will never recover from the national trashing she’s experienced. The worst came through the tabloid press, namely the Globe, which ran the girl’s picture and name repeatedly, along with headlines like this: “Kobe Accuser in Cocaine Rehab!”

They wrote about her mental health, her sexual history, how she partied… nothing seemed off-limits for a tabloid that referred to the night of the alleged attack as “the night she was involved with Kobe.”
In contrast, USA Today ran only a photo of the young woman from the back, noting that the paper doesn’t identify alleged rape victims without their consent. Under the Colorado Rape Shield Law, her name also was not supposed to be released to the public by the court.

Some of the most fair and balanced reporting on the case came from the sports press, notably Sports Illustrated. It broke the story that prosecutors might call a 22-year-old Florida woman who claimed Bryant had groped her at the home of his former teammate, Shaquille O’Neal, on Thanksgiving Day in 2002. It plugged the exclusive on its cover with the headline: “How many more surprises?”

According to Sports Illustrated, the woman was among the employees of Orlando’s Planet Hollywood who worked a private party at O’Neal’s home and was groped by Bryant. Initially, she didn’t report the incident to authorities – she said someone called the day after to apologize for Bryant’s behavior – but came forward after she saw Bryant swear he was innocent of the Colorado charges. (Insiders say that in the end, the Florida woman refused to cooperate with prosecutors after she saw the smears and threats the Colorado woman was receiving.)

But whether the media were fair or slanted, they were all scrambling to cover a case where the judge had imposed a gag order on both sides. So, while attorneys were prohibited from talking publicly about the case, their court motions and filings were available.

And then there were four astonishing leaks from the court itself – all mistakes, they insisted, although every single one of them revealed information unfavorable to the accuser. There were dozens of individual points of contention:

   o Was the accuser really in a “stupor” and in “shock” when she returned from Bryant’s room? The defense said she wasn’t at all, citing a female hotel clerk who saw the accuser immediately after the incident and didn’t see anything wrong. But prosecutors knew that the two women didn’t know one another, so there was no history on which to gauge reactions. Besides, they not only had two close friends of the accuser ready to testify at how distraught she was, but two regular guests of the resort, who said she “looked like a completely different person” when she returned from Bryant’s hotel room.

   o Did the accuser concoct her story to get money from the state’s victim compensation fund, as the defense alleged? Her private attorneys, who were exempt from the gag order, called that charge “disgusting” and “obscene.” Under Colorado law, the girl was eligible for compensation for mental health treatments and lost wages. The court approved about $20,000 – some paid directly to a mental health provider, with most of it going to her father to repay his out-of-pocket expenses for her inpatient hospitalization. She also got $2,357.50 for lost wages. The Vail Daily quoted experts saying it was “far-fetched” that the alleged victim would concoct a crime to get the state to pay for her mental health treatments. One paper noted that the size of the bill “speaks to the depth and level of trauma this victim was treated for.”

o Were the accuser’s injuries “minor,” as the defense had claimed, or evidence of “vaginal trauma,” as the prosecution contended? Sexual assault expert Dr. Carole Jenny told the court that she had seen “thousands” of victims in her career, but estimated that “perhaps less than 50 had as many injuries as [this girl] had.” She stressed that consensual sex would not show that kind of bruising. But it was how the girl got those bruises that became the deciding factor in the public’s mind. The defense said she didn’t get them by being raped by Kobe Bryant, but by having sex with multiple partners within three days, including someone else after Bryant, but before she went to the local police.

In the minds of many, if she had been raped, she wouldn’t have been having sex with someone else the next morning. That theory was raised early on in the court hearings by Bryant’s defense attorney, Pamela Mackey, who asked in open court if the vaginal injuries could be “consistent with someone who had had sex with three different men in three days?” (Mackey also repeatedly used the victim’s name in open court, despite chastisements from the judge.) Later, the court would inadvertently release the transcript of a closed-door hearing in which a defense witness said she conducted DNA tests on the panties the accuser wore to her rape medical test, finding the sperm of both Bryant and a Mr. X – evidence, she said, that led her to believe the girl had sex with someone else after Bryant.

So, how in the world do you counter evidence like that? “It was just a crock,” says the person closest to the case.

Dana Easter was the leading prosecuting attorney in the Kobe Bryant case, and she is still unhappy with how it turned out.

“It was a very good case – I was sad things got so awful for her that she felt she couldn’t go through with it,” Easter says in a phone interview. “We had a lot of evidence, and I really thought the jury would have seen through the shenanigans.”

Easter was on loan for this prosecution because she has been a specialist in sexual assault since 1989. “This was one of the strongest cases I’ve ever seen in an acquaintance rape,” she says flatly.
First, she says, there was the physical evidence – her rape exam showed vaginal trauma, and three drops of her blood was found on Bryant’s T-shirt. Then, there was the “believability” of the two people involved. “It’s a hallmark for us when someone lies,” Easter says.
“People lie when they have something to hide.” And then there was the accuser’s story. “This was a very credible outcry,” Easter says. “She implicates herself, and is truthful about very unattractive facts about herself. I’ve seen hundreds of these cases, and you learn what a credible outcry looks like.”

Easter said the gag order let the most outrageous things stand – like the suggestion that the accuser had sex after Bryant. Only the accusation was reported, Easter stressed, not the response. If there had been a trial, she says, the prosecution’s witnesses would have shown the jury that it was “just a crock.”

As she explains, the accuser had celebrated her birthday a dozen days before the Bryant encounter with an ex-boyfriend, having unprotected sex. One of the perks of her job was that she got to have a free room at the resort for this celebration. The bag she’d taken to her birthday celebration was still unpacked in her bedroom. She said she grabbed a pair of panties from the bag when she went in for her rape exam.
Easter surmises that sperm on those panties showed up in the DNA test. But she says her experts could have proved that that didn’t mean she had sex after the Bryant encounter, because “it was old sperm – there were no tails left on the sperm,” so it couldn’t have come from a recent ejaculation.

But nobody ever heard any of the rebuttal (nor the prosecution’s challenge that the test sample was also contaminated). All that the public heard was the charge, which came in a most suspicious way – the court mistakenly e-mailed this closed-door testimony to dozens of news organizations. This was the fourth time that court clerks had revealed information that was supposed to remain sealed until the trial. Although every leak hurt the prosecution, Easter says she accepts the court’s contention that all were simply mistakes made by court personnel.

“We never had a chance to submit a case,” she says. “The defense used the media to color the public opinion. We had gone through two days of jury selection [before the accuser pulled out], and I was very, very pleased with the open-minded [candidates]. They entertained the possibility that the media had been leading them astray.”

But defense attorney Pamela Mackey says she is “absolutely” sure a trial would have cleared her client. “He was innocent,” she declared in a phone interview. “Juries usually figure that out – thank goodness.”
At the time, she said she couldn’t comment on the facts of the case because her firm was still representing Kobe Bryant in his civil case.

But Bryant himself has spoken since the criminal case was dismissed – a statement that some believe came very close to an admission: “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… I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”

In the end, more than a rape charge was on trial in that Colorado courtroom. Sexual assault experts say the state’s tough Rape Shield Law was shredded when the judge said the accuser’s sexual history would be allowed into evidence.

Experts in this field note that rape has little to do with sex, and a lot to do with violence. They also point out that a female’s sexual history is irrelevant – what does that have to do with her saying “no” in this instance? And, of course, there’s always the double standard, that a man’s sexual adventures are considered part of growing up, while a woman’s are considered a sign of a bad character.

As this case progressed, the Colorado media was filled with warnings by experts that what was happening in the courtroom would have devastating implications. The director of the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault said this case will become “the poster child” for women who refuse to report a rape – this showed their fears are right, that they’ll lose their privacy and will be blamed for what happened.
Easter says she’s heard all the fears, admitting that one of her professional colleagues told her she’d never let her daughter report a rape. But she doesn’t think the Rape Shield Law has been destroyed.
She thinks judges will continue interpreting it.

But she is still concerned about what happened to the young woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape.

She notes that the girl had to be talked into going to the police. “She had the normal embarrassment, shame and fear,” Easter says. “She had absolutely no idea what hell would descend on her and her family. She’s a remarkable young woman. Ultimately, this was too much for her.”

At one point, it seemed that Dr. Spiers, herself a young woman, would become the trial liaison with the accuser, helping “hold her hand,” as it were, through the trial. But that never happened, because there was no criminal trial. But Dr. Spiers isn’t surprised it ended this way: “This was a girl whose life had been turned upside down. The sexual assault was only the beginning of the assault against her.”

There’s an interesting footnote to this case. After the criminal case was dismissed on September 1, the prosecution joined news organizations in opposing attempts by Bryant’s attorneys to permanently seal the evidence in the case. They argued that the public had a legitimate interest in reviewing the files so they could see the actions of prosecutors, defense attorneys and the judge – they argued that that outweighed Kobe Bryant’s right of privacy. Bryant’s attorney, Pamela Mackey, originally said she wanted the files sealed because they contained “highly sensitive, confidential, embarrassing and private matters.” She has since relented.