On a Kind of Survival

We Lost Kobe & His Daughter and Gained Another Impossible Discussion About Rape

Lately it seems like I am mad on Twitter a lot. Last night I got really mad. Like thread-it-and-make-them-STFU mad. Like @ing-people-I-like mad. It’s often the same thing—anger at white America on a whole bevy of causes. I watched Midsommar on Saturday and I thought to myself, this madness is what white people seem like to me a lot. A crazed cult I am supposed to be part of but will never be in with and in the end I never want to be in with anyway.

Then on Saturday I had a text message from an old LA friend with just four letters: KOBE. I was confused and then went on Twitter and saw his name was trending. This wasn’t like seeing Betty White’s name and hoping she was still alive. Kobe is my age—him not existing was not part of any reality I could fathom.

And yet.

This was my whole Sunday. The thing is, he was an LA icon. If you were from LA, you were into Kobe. It actually took the obits to make me realize he was originally from Pennsylvania. Anyway, I thought grief would be it but then came another struggle, the angry one. I saw a friend of mine, a former actress now in publicity—a white woman who knows a lot of celebrities—post nothing but an article about his rape case minutes after his death was even speculated. I immediately tweeted back at her, why on earth would you tweet this? She wrote back immediately, “Because I never forgot.” I wanted to laugh. I never forgot. No one ever forgot. Suddenly all sorts of white women and some white men on my timeline were remarking on how conveniently people were forgetting he was a rapist. But at the same time the obits were coming out and not a single one left out the rape case. It was a big part of his life, to everyone who knew his life. It was in many ways my introduction to him.

In 2003 when this played on the news all the time, I was just a handful of years out from my own rape, the second one. I have been raped twice, by a total of three men. Age 19, age 20.

I was angry when I heard the details of Kobe’s rape. I never once forgot it. I never thought of Kobe without thinking of it, until he died and my attention was on the fact that he had a wife and four daughters and that one of them had died with him. Kobe had in fact died in a helicopter full of women, all involved somehow with his basketball league. In the last few months, like many on Twitter, I had become obsessed with viral memes of him and his daughter at basketball games. Kobe looked to be ballsplaining to his daughter Gigi who was a great basketball player herself. And now dead at 13.

My own trauma was not the first thing on my mind when this news broke out and I felt upset that it was for others. I felt most upset at people who kept pushing the word rape on all of us, as if it weren’t traumatic enough to reconcile your complicated feelings for an icon. These people must never have loved or grieved people who have done harm, I thought. Just imagine that.

I think every person I have ever grieved was in some way or another a bad person too. A good person, a bad person too. This will be me as well. This will be you.

Imagine not understanding this. Imagine a world where you only see good guys and bad guys. Imagine it being more important to perform your outrage for a grieving public while the blood is barely dry. Imagine lacking this basic decency. 

It is always with these sorts of incidents that I think to myself I am not American. Only Americans and usually white Americans would act this way. 

The rest of us maybe are too close to death to disrespect it like that.

*

I couldn’t sleep last night. I am sure I was not the only one. I watched Grammy clips and tried to drown myself in the joy of Lizzo and LilNasX and BTS and all kids of POC excellence, but Kobe and Gigi would not leave my mind.

Neither would rape.

I realized I haven’t written about it much. It’s appeared in my tweets and Facebook posts but it was even pulled from my memoir Sick. My old editor thought it was off-topic and the legal department was worried about my allegations. Three men afterall. One a public figure.

I’ve thrown up twice since I started to write about this. It’s the only time I really throw up, when I think about this.

A lifetime of therapy could not solve this.

*

It was 1998, the first time. I was a college sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College just outside NYC and I could not afford to fly back home to LA. I was a scholarship kid—just going home for Christmas and summer was a lot for my family. Our spring breaks were two weeks at SLC so my boyfriend at the time and I decided to take up a friend’s invite and go to Martha’s Vineyard for the two weeks. This friend of ours had a dad who was tenured at Yale and she just seemed very fancy and apparently they had a mansion on the island. I had never been on an island. I knew these East Coast ones were where elite white people hung out. 

This friend—let’s call her L—was kind of a friend of a friend. I didn’t know her well. But we were into the same kind of music scenes—that era where punk, grunge, hip hop, and electronic all had overlapping audiences—and she claimed some very famous bands partied there. This seemed amazing.

At this point, I dabbled in drugs pretty liberally. The boyfriend—let’s call him T—had introduced me to coke, which I loved, and soon enough through NYC club-land I was into Ecstasy too. Alcohol and weed were just supplements for those other drugs. I loved my life. I had short hair, was way too thin (I was a fit model then), I interned at nightlife staple Paper magazine, and I was already known as a writer on campus. Off-campus I experimented with slam poetry events, which always bled into my nightlife interests too. The boyfriend was a photographer. He didn’t know fancy things either but was artsy enough too to interest rich people. 

Our first stop on Martha’s Vineyard was a bar, the second a liquor store. My memory of the first days there was us drinking Allen’s Ginger Brandy all day and night. I don’t think we slept. There were many guests and we all had our own suites in this giant mansion. The boys in the famous grunge bands would come in and out and eventually it became normal to me. Working in fashion (my internship was part assistant-styling) I had already done things like put pasties on Naomi Campbell and undress A Tribe Called Quest down to their boxers, so I felt I had training in celebrities. I knew how to ignore them just enough that they would find me as intriguing as I found them, or so I thought.

There is a photo of me from that final day in tight corduroy plaid pants and a purple turtleneck and bandana on my head, clearly tipsy, balancing against a railing on the pier. I was in danger but I still didn’t know.

One of the grunge rockstars who took notice of me was a guy I will call M. M was in W Magazine that month, a spread on the current grunge bad boys. He was so handsome and so crazy. I couldn’t even see my boyfriend when he was in the room. He had greasy blond hair and muscular arms full of tattoos and he and I smoked together nonstop. His best friend was a black DJ from Providence—let’s call him D. I found both of them hot and charming—they had a decade on my boyfriend and they represented this other life I could have if only I could gamble everything that got me on the East Coast in the first place: namely, an education.

We would all kill hours at this famous bar and there was an old guy there everyone knew. Let’s call him R. R was an old Normandy paratrooper—a war hero. He was also the town drunk. One day it was our turn to drive him to the old folk’s home since no one else wanted to. R kept going on and on about how it was his birthday and he wanted to die. The bartender just rolled his eyes and told us he always said that.

In the car I was stuck in the backseat with R. I wanted to hear about Normandy, he wanted to shove me against the window. I was too drunk to do anything but laugh. When we got to the home, my boyfriend and another guy he had become chummy with, went ahead of us and I was stuck trying to hold ranting and raving R up. 

“You gotta try to walk straight,” I kept telling him. It was raining lightly and almost dark and I wanted to get back to the mansion.

He kept shoving me and ranting and it was so unpleasant. I yelled to the guys to slow down and help me.

“Please, you have to let me get you there,” I kept telling R, as he teetered. He was in his 80s and I was worried he could fall.

Eventually he pushed me so hard I got frustrated. “Fine, you want to walk alone, go ahead!” I yelled and I tried to catch up with the guys ahead.

And then I heard a thud.

I will never forget that sound.

I ran back to gather him from the ground. His body was like a motor rumbling, his skull was bleeding into my hand. This man was dying. I kept calling for my boyfriend and his friend to come and help us but it took a while for them to hear my eventual screams.

They did finally and someone called 911—there were no cell phones then so they had to go into the home and get someone’s attention. 911 took ages. In that time, I cradled this dying bleeding man. 

I remember the other guy with my boyfriend dipped his finger in the blood and put bloody crosses on our foreheads as we sobbed in the rain. We let him do that probably because we were drunk and probably because we realized we would never forget this day.

Eventually we got back to the mansion and no one could get out of us what had happened. We were in too much shock. I quickly rushed to the shower, eager to get the blood off me. There was so much blood. I was 19 and a man—an old war hero even—had died in my arms. What right had I.

I was still drunk.

When I left the shower in my towel—the bathroom was in our suite—I suddenly realized I was not alone in the bedroom. M and D were lying on our bed, smiling, clearly drunk and drugged.

“What are you doing here?” I asked but maybe I knew.

“Waiting for you,” M said, grinning.

And then it was like choreography. D’s hands on my wrists, M’s on my waist and neck. My clothes off, theirs mostly on, and my screams and their laughter. Their hands on my mouth and my eventual silence.

In the end, someone broke in—they had locked the door—and found us and they convinced my boyfriend it was just a menage-a-trois, nothing really. He believed them for a while until I ran out and started walking by the ocean, desperate to get out. 

The next morning we got a cab to get us out of there. Cape Cod to Boston. We got my parents to pay for us to stay at a cheap hotel on Harvard Square which felt safe somehow. The next day we’d go back to Sarah Lawrence.

On the bus ride back my boyfriend kept crying. I did not at all. I finally asked him what was making him do that, and he said, “I just can’t believe something like this could happen to my girlfriend.” We only lasted a few more months.

When spring break was over, rumors circulated around about me. Girls who were close to L looked at me with a mix of horror and concern. No one talked to me about it or anything really. I had become some sort of pariah. We were all too young to have frank discussions about rape. When a hallmate suggested therapy, I just laughed. 

“Why would I do that? This happens to everyone,” I remember saying and it was really what I believed in that final teenage year. It had just been a matter of time.

*

A year later, it happened again. I had gone on my junior year abroad to Oxford partially to dry out from all the debauchery of SLC and NYC. I had mostly but then I came back for spring break to New York. A London friend and I went to a club and I met a handsome guy who was a Rutgers medical student. Tall blond, too preppy it seemed for clubs. A week later he took me to a Prodigy record release party in the East Village and would not drop me off home to my friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. I ended up at his place in Newark. I woke up that morning to him raping me. He dumped me off at the Newark PATH station in tears and rumpled clothes, frantic and lost. I ended up getting mugged by a group of girls. I took the train to the World Trade Center stop and I used a payphone to call my friend in Brooklyn. When he answered I couldn’t speak. I kept calling and I kept being silent. I was catatonic with horror for some time.

It happens to everyone maybe but twice?

Following that incident I plunged deeper into drugs and I found myself more and more depressed. I began getting panic attacks. I started hiding more. I stopped writing.

I’ve never quite been the same.

You never are.

They call us survivors but I hate that name. I don’t want any sort of prize, any notions close to sainthood.

I want to undo those incidents. They didn’t make me stronger. They broke me.

Kobe’s victim was 19. He had teenage daughters—his whole family was women. I wonder how much he thought about what happened. I assume a lot. This sort of thing actually leaves no survivors if you are to be honest.

*

I find myself still fighting people online today to stop talking about his rape. We know. I know. If you care about us, maybe stop using it politically to get likes and RTs, but to be honest I don’t know why they are doing it. Trauma is complicated. The world was designed so there are no pure good guys and bad guys. We are all on a spectrum.

I for one have loved many people who have done harm.

And when years ago I found the Instagram profile of the old faded rocker M who was trying to relaunch his career, I thought about going public with this story. But then I saw he had a family, full of women too. And then I thought so what. And then I thought but that’s what, how could I, and why, what did I want. And then I thought, who cares, we need these stories. And then I thought, who needs these stories. And then I realized: everyone.

Every obit mentions Kobe’s rape. It’s part of his legacy. No one has forgotten, as much as a few Twitter feminists try to pretend we have.

We remember too much. This is the problem. How do we go on? Do we ever go on?

I went on. Somehow. But I realized in writing this, in vomiting my way through it, there is still a lot I have to process. And the problem with so much social media is that it does not allow room for processing, just reacting. 

May we all make space. For all the complications, all the beauty and all the ugliness too. May we remember the good with the bad, and the bad with the good. May we survive.