Millennials got schooled on sex ed on television. Bill Clinton taught us what oral sex was, deploying a defense for a decade of teenage boys to use on unwilling girls (“It doesn’t count as actual sex!”), and a few years later, Kobe Bryant taught us what rape was. And, perhaps more importantly, the media taught us how to blame the victim.
Although Bryant massively manned up in his later life, recommitting to his faith and attempting to redeem himself through charity, the forensic evidence made it pretty clear: While staying at a Colorado hotel, the basketball star consensually kissed a 19-year-old employee and then proceeded to strangle her as he raped her. Between Bryant’s lies to the police and the ample forensic evidence, including the alleged victim’s blood on Bryant’s shirt and a rape kit proving vaginal trauma and lacerations, the criminal case to convict Bryant was strong. Ultimately, it was the media that let him walk free, thanks to an ongoing harassment campaign that led to the accuser backing out of testifying against him.
The accuser, you see, was what every girl in my generation would learn constituted a “Bad Victim.” And despite 18 years and the entire #MeToo movement passing since the 2003 case and the Loudoun County rape case, the media playbook has remained the same.
Like Bryant’s accuser, the teenage girl who alleged a “gender fluid” boy had raped her in a public school bathroom had the facts and forensic evidence on her side, and as with most victims, she was victimized twice over: by her rapist and by a system that seeks to silence survivors. In the time elapsed between the rape and the eventual conviction, the Loudoun County School Board denied any rapes had happened in its bathrooms in the hopes of pushing a controversial transgender bathroom policy, and rather than keep the boy out of school during criminal proceedings, he went to another school where he allegedly sexually assaulted a second victim. But even with a conviction, the press found a way to undermine the victim.
The vilest iteration of the rape apologia regarding the Loudoun County case came from supposed feminist Michelle Goldberg. In a piece deeming the story a “Big Lie,” the New York Times writer deemed the rape — again, one proven beyond a reasonable doubt in juvenile court — mere “relationship violence.”
The righteous indignation was just a “nationwide moral panic,” Goldberg argued, because rather than be ambushed by a transgender stranger — again, none of the original reporting by Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire ever said this — the victim had sexual relations with the rapist before. Goldberg writes:
The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.
There is no “but” to this story. A rape by someone you know is no less tragic than a rape by a stranger, and it is far more common. The very notion that this rape, and the school board’s subsequent silencing of the victim’s family for political purposes, are no less egregious because it doesn’t fulfill some sort of anti-trans gotcha projected by liberals pissed that Rosiak broke a damning story.
And sadly enough, it’s utterly reminiscent of how the press handled the Bryant story.
“There is little doubt that the tall, blond young woman now labeled the ‘alleged victim’ in the Kobe Bryant rape case once enjoyed the spotlight,” wrote the Washington Post at the time, in a piece about the accuser’s personal life that added next to nothing about the material evidence relevant to the case. (Also what is the implication here? That being the victim of a high-profile rape case is as enjoyable as auditioning for American Idol?)
And rather than abide by basic rape shield protocols that deem an accuser’s prior sexual history, much was made of the fact that the accuser had consensual sex with a partner a few days prior. My entire generation learned that, like a horror movie, only virgins survive the scrutiny of a rape case. Sure, Goldberg has the language of fourth-wave feminism to frame her lessening of the Loudoun County scandal, but was that rape really as bad as deflowering a virgin?
Like Bryant’s accuser, the Loudoun County victim had a good case. They both had rape kits, went immediately to the authorities, and told the truth, as uncomfortable as it was. But because they had the sin of once choosing to have sex before, the media knew they were the worst kind of Bad Victim.
