I can't count the number of people I know whose husbands, fathers or other relatives are in jail or have been in jail, who have lost children and spouses, and who have never had support for their grief. A lot of homeless people have those emotional burdens, and many of them had breakdowns from those losses that made them homeless. I have suggested before that homeless shelters offer grief support groups; I have never personally known a shelter in any state to have a group like that. That's not what people who have never been homeless think about when they think of homeless people; they don't think of human beings who have collapsed from burdens that nobody could carry. They think of homeless people as if they are a subspecies.
Those grieving people, with their devastated lives, many of them also in poor health, have been criminally victimized by voyeurism and involuntary pornography for years, and every professional, male athlete in the United States has known about it during all that time.
Nobody can help being sorry for this much loss, but Kobe Bryant didn't really change and neither did the industries that encouraged him to be a predator and then protected him for committing a felony.
The publicity for this tragedy should be over as soon as possible. It is hellish for sexual assault survivors all around the world, and it's reinforcing the dangerous idea that rape is excusable if you're good at sports.
I have never really felt anything like this before, the anger and the fear, for everything that the adulation of him is implying about the media and society, and all the people who know that I'm telling the truth, who are so contemptuous of me while they deflect all responsibility, and who are making public statements about how upset they are and what a good guy he was. Their collective ability to compartmentalize is terrifying.
