In a massive 24-tweet thread last Friday, Disney heiress and award-winning documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney doubled down on her prior statements in which she had tweeted after the tragic death of former NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, “The man was a rapist. Deal with it.” In the new thread, Disney concluded, “Don’t deify him because he was not a god. That’s all. Just don’t deify him.”
Disney began, “OK, time to bite the bullet and say something. Thread. 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.”
She continued:
One woman, gang raped in Bosnia and left for dead, told me “When I was raped, I became a refugee inside my own body.” I feel terrible for Kobe’s family and especially for Vanessa. It is unequivocally horrible that all these lives were lost to a terrible tragedy.
Disney then acknowledged that Bryant had evolved into a fine person, but she still had some concerns:
I mourn Kobe too. He went on to be a man who seemed genuinely to want to do good. The face that he raped someone does not change any of these other facts. A person can, in one lifetime, do both good and bad. We all do, in fact, even the sanctimonious folks on twitter.
I don’t think there is a need to relitigate the whole thing here. His own statement says it all. Yes, the prosecutor dropped the case, on condition he make a statement he did so at the instruction of the victim who was under so many death threats from sports fans she continue … (the tweet broke off there).
Disney went on:
Here is what he said: “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 admire this statement. It sounds genuine to me. I think it was an act of great personal courage for him to make it. But let’s be clear: if he did not feel that it was a rape and she did, whose view should take precedence? Well, if you feel raped, can an apology unrape you? Can the “accidental” nature of the rape unrape you? Putting the best spin on it you possibly can, he didn’t mean to rape her, but nevertheless she experienced it as a rape.
When a drunk driver kills someone, does his lack of intention absolve him of responsibility for the death? 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. We are responsible for all of the things we do, whether or not we meant to do them. So what would have been a better outcome? Should Kobe have simply disappeared and never had a life? NO, most certainly not. He became a role model and that was nice.
But he did so at the expense of the truth. No one in LA wanted to believe he’d done what he did. I had friends in LA at the time, feminists, who never stopped apologizing for him and engaging in exactly the kind of victim blaming that goes whenever the ranks close on the girl who dares to report. We feminists have worked hard to change this. We have made some real progress. Many people and not just feminists know that it is not okay to say she was in his room, she was dressed provocatively, she was star struck, what did she expect?
Disney posited that Bryant should have done more to “promote awareness”:
But wow, something about Kobe. Those of us who pointed out the fact of Kobe’s less pleasant past were not saying that what happened was not sad or tragic. It was deeply tragic. But here’s the thing. Once you become a “refugee inside your own body,” it becomes excruciating to watch the person who did it, or, in fact, to watch the person who did that to someone else get the sainthood treatment under any circumstances.
If he had gone on to acknowledge what he’d done, if he had gone on to actively promote awareness among the millionsof young men and women who would come to admire him, if he had, from time to time, resisted his own deification, it would have been different. If he had only been willing to acknowledge that whether unconsciously or not, he had hurt someone in a way that is seldom reparable and that he regrets it, if he had just felt her pain instead of his own, if he had built a road away from the mistake that incorporated it rather than make it invisible, it would have all be so different.
She then referenced herself:
Those of us fighting for the victims of sexual violence do not care if you think we are monsters. We are used to it. We do not care if you think men are being ruined by the consequences they are forced to bear because of their own victimizing behavior because our attentionis focused on the men and women who have already been ruined by that man’s behavior, and justice for what he has done is a small part back out of the pit of despair he has driven them into. It’s just justice we are asking for after all. Justice. That’s all.
She segued to the case of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein:
Justice will always be hard for us to get. How often does a rape have a witness? How often is there physical evidence? Our “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard makes convictions all but impossible, especially in a society that continues to believe that anything less than
Perfect behavior from birth on the part of the accuser somehow establishes a reasonable doubt as to the behavior of the accused. You can see it all on display now in the Weinstein case, where every misjudgment and misstep and even normal behavior is called into question. To absolve this man of his hard to deny patterns of predation over decades. If he can’t be convicted, I don’t know who can. But how long did it take for anyone to say anything? Why? Because the people who knew–and pretty much everyone knew–were afraid …
Disney concluded:
They were afraid of him, they were afraid of the people who would rise in his defense, and they were afraid of what people would say about them. Just like the way a million other women didn’t say what I said. Because they’d be attacked and vilified for having called out the deification of a man who had done a thing that was hard to forgive.
So yes, we should mourn him. 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.