The Name-Naming Game
by Bob Cook

I know the name of the Colorado woman who accused Kobe Bryant of sexual assault. I've seen what are purportedly pictures of her. I know her phone number and her e-mail address. I even know her parents' names, address and how much property tax they paid last year. I learned none of this from newspapers, TV or radio.

I learned it on the Internet, of course.

This isn't the first time the victim, or alleged victim, of a sex crime has had her name and face posted online. But the Kobe Bryant case is certainly the most prominent one, and it's a case that seemingly has mainstream media backed into a corner. On the one hand, there has been a longstanding policy at most media outlets not to name sexual assault and rape victims. On the other hand, there is a core of readership who wants to know, and various websites are satisfying that need. This has the potential, it appears, to make mainstream media look like overprotective mother hens.

The standard for not naming names comes from a desire to prevent the potential stigmatization of the victim. The stigma used to come from a widespread feeling that a woman's rape was her fault, or that she had somehow become unclean. There's less of that feeling now, but many women's and victims' groups have argued to keep up victims' anonymity, saying such crimes are still underreported. Knowing that an accuser's name could be splashed across the media, they argue, would lead to even fewer rape survivors willing to go to the police.

The odd thing about this rule is that it does not prevent mainstream media from finding out everything about Bryant's alleged victim. The woman's friends — her friends! — appear more than willing to run to the media to talk all about her. On "Good Morning America," one friend told Diane Sawyer about the woman's state of mind after whatever happened with Bryant. Various news outlets have talked to friends about how the woman is a good pianist and once tried out for "American Idol." (Amazingly, Simon Cowell appears not to have been contacted.) Mainstream media have reported where she went to high school and where she is going to college. And, of course, there have been many references back to the friend who told the Orange County Register about how the alleged victim nearly overdosed on pills two months ago. (That friend now claims she was "tricked" by the paper.) It seems only a matter of time before we learn her favorite food.

So media outlets are ready to report almost anything except her name and her face, even though the zillions of reporters who will eventually file in and out of the Eagle County courthouse will speak it to each other and recognize it as Bryant's court case goes on.

Yet in the weekend after Bryant's indictment in Eagle, Colo., posters to numerous message boards asked where they could find a name and pictures of the alleged victim. And, as has happened in high-profile cases before — the sexual assault accusation against former Green Bay Packer Mark Chmura, who was eventually acquitted, comes to mind — someone has gotten a name, searched for all the information on that name and placed it online.

So why don't mainstream media just give in, and stop looking so anachronistic?

Although there's a readership that may demand it, newspapers, TV and radio have a lot more to lose disclosing names than they do keeping them off the air. Name a name, and you can expect the phone to ring off the hook, even more than if you dropped Beetle Bailey. You would become the center of media attention, have your name invoked in long threads on Romenesko, see protesters outside your building and have a meeting with the publisher to explain all the dropped subscriptions.

Rape is not a topic discussed freely among polite company, and mainstream media is polite company. Look at how the Washington Post's ombudsman made note of objections to humor columnist Gene Weingarten just for using the word "fart." The Internet, as has been well established, is not polite company. Often, when it comes to news, the Internet is the girlie mag you tuck inside an issue of Time so no one knows you're reading it.

Second, looking at the misogynistic and racist message board posts on the sites where Bryant's accuser is named, and the grotesque Photoshop treatments of Bryant and his accuser, it's become clear that there's an audience that wants to know the name and see the face for reasons other than respectful curiosity. Stigmatization of rape and sexual assault victims is alive and well in this arena, with these wack jobs motivated to make sure the alleged victim's life is more of a living hell than it probably is now. Who wants responsibility for that?

The Kobe Bryant case is having the interesting and unintended effect of separating the respectable news and information sources from the junk. The Internet, as an entity, already has come under loads of criticism for throwing up any information without checking it out. Now the willingness of a site to throw out just anything, even if it's true, without thinking about who's reading can make the stuffy ol' traditional media look better. Kudos to the stuffy.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.