[Everybody keeps talking about anal rape, apparently because that was the rumor at the time. Care to share a link substantiating the salacious claim?]
No clue whether it panned out, but the central salacious claim isn’t anal rape - it’s rape accompanied by neck bruising from being held in place via strangulation. The girl got OJ’d by Bryant’s vastly superior financial resources, and chose a financial settlement over a public trial during which her name and face would be plastered all over the internet. This was before today’s #MeToo culture when even trading sex for favors makes a woman a victim. Back then, rape victims were considered Jezebels who had it coming*.
Here’s the prosecutor’s account of what happened once Bryant got lawyered up:
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/28591646/kobe-bryant-colorado-prosecutor-recalls-case-linked-them
[The frenzy overwhelmed his case too. Reporters would do their own investigations and “mess things up,” Hurlbert says, by both interviewing potential witnesses and scaring off others. Most media didn’t print the woman’s name, but the Eagle County court, which Hurlbert did not oversee and was in a different part of county government, mistakenly released her identity to the media three times, and a sealed transcript of a closed hearing on DNA evidence was emailed to media outlets. Hurlbert believed that “it truly was an accident” by the court, but the damage was done. The woman’s identity became the worst-kept secret around town. Pamela Mackey, Bryant’s attorney, had disclosed the woman’s name six times in a preliminary hearing and had cited her sexual history. “It was the start of a nightmare for this woman,” says Mark Shaw, a lawyer and reporter who covered the case for ESPN. “It was the accuse-the-accuser defense. From that point on, she didn’t have a chance. She was looked at as this person who was putting this poor celebrity through all of this anguish.”
Some legal experts believed that the prosecution and court were overmatched by the magnitude of the case and by Bryant’s resources. But Hurlbert tried his best to remember that, at its core, it was a routine sexual assault case, the kind he had prosecuted before. He assigned two prosecutors to it. “We felt we had a handle on it,” he says.
But in late August 2004, just days before the trial was to begin, the woman, who declined to comment Wednesday through her attorney, informed Hurlbert that she didn’t want to testify. He understood. He asked her to think about it for a few days. During that time, he called other prosecutors for their advice on what was left of a rape case if the accuser refused to testify. The consensus: The case was over. Hurlbert technically could subpoena her, but he felt that would be amoral. He called her, but her mind was made up. He respected her decision.
On Sept. 1, 2004, he dropped the case. Bryant released a statement, apologizing to the woman and her family while admitting no guilt. The two sides reached a confidential civil settlement in March 2005. “I was disappointed that we had to dismiss the case,” Hurlbert says now. “I wish it had gone to a 12-person jury.
“But the victim was going through hell.”]
* As LP Hartley once wrote - the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The girl got OJ’d by Bryant’s vastly superior financial resources, and chose a financial settlement over a public trialActually, the accuser's story wasn't credible because:
(1) The prosecution's main witness was a coworker the accuser said she'd slept with only a day or two before the alleged rape.
(2) Not even a full day after the alleged rape, a DNA test was administered on the woman, and the DNA was found to be from another man (not Kobe).
We could go on and on about the problems the prosecution had with this case and the accuser's story.