Some stray thoughts on the whole Kobe Bryant debacle:

1: Kobe admitted that he committed adultery with the woman who’s charging him with rape. I’m betting all my money that this isn’t the first time Kobe has “wandered in foreign lands,” if you catch my drift. In fact, if this woman was among the first 20 or 30 he’s doinked on the QT I’d be stunned.

A few years back I was attending a conference at the Marriott in San Antonio. I’m sitting in the hotel lobby, over near the bar, waiting for some friends so we can go to dinner. And I’m looking around, just stunned by all the women. Must have been a couple dozen of them, decked out to max, just milling around. I had no idea what was going on, but it looked like the hotel might be hosting a beauty pageant or something, and from the looks of things there was going to be a lot of drop-dead gorgeous finishing out of the money. Just then this tall guy walks by toward the door, and the babes formed up a gauntlet for him. I’m like, damn, that looked like Penny Hardaway (who was then a member of the Orlando Magic). Then it hit me – sumbitch, that was Penny Hardaway. Turns out the Marriott was a short distance from the arena where the San Antonio Spurs played their home games, and the Magic were in town. The Marriott was the official visiting team hotel, and these attractive young ladies were the NBA equivalent of camp followers. Hanging out, looking good, hoping to catch a ride on the star train. Umm-hmm. The act repeated itself the next night when the Utah Jazz checked in.

So if you’re Kobe, opportunity is not an issue. And you’ll play hell convincing me that, after having four or five years of women throwing themselves at him, a dozen or two in every port, that his little rendezvous up in Edwards was the first time he ever availed himself of the sampler platter. We people are creatures of habit, and there is no habit known to the species more powerful than sex.

2: I believe them both. I think the woman bringing the charges honestly feels she was raped, and I’m certain that Kobe doesn’t think he raped anybody. The problem here is that sex can be confusing, especially in a society as wacked as ours is on the subject of sexuality. And if you don’t know this, that can only mean that either you’ve never been very close to sex, or that you have an almost plant-like tendency toward reflection. The confusion can be exacerbated by any number of factors, including things like youth, alcohol, and religion. If you’re young, Baptist, and drunk, well, you’re lucky if you come out of an encounter able to remember your name, but that’s another story. Specifically, it’s the story of where so many little Baptists come from, but I digress.

So who knows what the young woman thought she was getting into or what she thought she wanted out of the encounter. There’s been ample evidence in the press lately that she was going through a tough period in her life, and none of that likely lent any clarity to the situation when a handsome, charming superstar athlete invited her up his room and put the make on her. Kobe, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted out of the encounter, but probably had no clue in hell what he was dealing with. He didn’t know she’d attempted suicide. He didn’t know her boyfriend had dumped her for another girl. He didn’t know her friend had recently died. And even if he had, he’d have no way of knowing what this all added up to in her mind and how that affected her perception of what it meant that she went to his room. Kobe strikes me as the sort who’s never had to devote a lot of energy to figuring women out, and this is a case where a little experience would have served him well.

Worst of all, none of this helps us know what happened, really. We don’t know if she said no, although it seems likely enough that she did, and if she did, we don’t know if it was a clear message or part of an incredibly baffling package of mixed messages or something in between. We do know that in this society, if a guy hears something that sounds at least vaguely like “no,” he’d be wise to assume no by god means no and forget the rest of the messages he thinks he’s getting, no matter what they sound like. But – and here comes the part that will piss a lot of people off – no doesn’t always mean no. No it doesn’t. And the point is illustrated by all kinds of actual research on how the genders communicate (to say nothing of anecdotal evidence). Men are direct communicators, while women are more negotiational (is that a word?), and this key difference lies at the bottom of about a zillion miscommunications between the sexes each day. With respect to a sexual encounter between a man and woman who don’t know each other very well, it’s a miracle if there aren’t miscommunications.

A hypothetical case: suppose a woman says no, but says it as she’s pulling down her own pants. And suppose you’re on the jury trying to sort through this muck.

Suppose, because I can just about guarantee you that it’s coming, or something close enough to it.

3: Maybe a little communication theory will help.

When we think of communication, we tend to think of speech. But communication also passes between us via other modes. All manner of nonverbal cues communicate – my wife hugs me and kisses me when I get home from work, and even if she doesn’t say a word I know this means she’s happy to see me, right? So what other modes are there? Well, there’s gesture – anything from flipping somebody off on the obvious end to tucking your feet under your chair when you’re hoping to end a conversation and leave the room. There’s distance – you can tell a lot about people’s relationship by how close they are to each other. And there’s sexuality – there’s actually some science behind that old “international language of love” thing. In the Kobe case, this mode is hugely important.

Now, some modes of communication are more reliable than others. Speech is actually not very reliable at all, because it’s a conscious act and we frequently choose to deceive or mislead. It’s easy to lie with words, and I’m guessing we all enough experience with this phenomenon that I don’t have to explain it in too much detail. Gesture is more reliable, because we’re frequently not all that aware of the signals our body language sends. Women tell me that a sure sign a woman is interested in a guy is if she touches her hair. But women don’t set out to play with their hair when they see a guy they want to talk to. The fact that’s it’s unconscious means it more accurately reflects what a person wants. Distance is incredibly reliable because we are so completely unconscious of it.

Sexuality? Umm, well, sex is about as reliable as speech. All sorts of power games play out using sex as a tool, and as noted above, it’s a medium that’s infested with confusion. How many lies and how many wagonloads of manipulation have been communicated through sex in our history? Umm-hmm. True dat. That means it’s harder for both the “sender” and the “receiver” in the “communication dyad” to sort out what’s really going on.

I don’t expect either prosecution or defense attorneys will be calling any communication theorists to offer expert testimony on the reliability of sex as a medium, but it might be something worth paying attention to as the evidence presents itself to those of us out here in TV-land.

4: So, if Kobe has wandered down this path before, I’m willing to bet that somewhere out there is a girl, listening to the stories about the alleged victim’s physical injuries, and nodding her head. Umm-hmm, knows all about that. The question is, do we hear from this hypothetical girl before the end of the trial?

5: On the other side of the bed we have the alleged victim. So the story is that Kobe invited her up to the room, she said yes, showed up of her own free will, and engaged in some “consensual sexual activity.” A little over- or under-the-sweater action, perhaps, maybe even a stand-up triple? Ain’t nobody being too specific just yet. Now, just like I’m betting there’s a history out there on Kobe, I’m also betting that somewhere up in Eagle County there’s a high school boy nodding his head, thinking uh-huh, I know how that went, don’t I? Question is, do we get any high school boys on the stand testifying to what a tease the girl was? And if so, what kind of effect does it have on a jury? If this girl is like the pretty girls at most high schools in America, there are boys with not-so-fond memories of her, and you can’t help thinking one or two of them might be willing to tell his story if the right incentives came along. Of course, this is just wild fantasizing on my part, because no high-paid defense lawyer would ever play that kind of cynical game in a rape trial.

6: The more money you got, the more justice you can afford. I remember watching the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and I still don’t know whether he was guilty or not. But I do know this. Had Smith’s lawyer and the DA switched chairs, he’d be somebody’s bitch in prison right now. Now, Kobe can afford some lawyering – believe dat. And when a case goes all high profile and the Big Money gets involved, history favors the defense. Kick-ass prosecutors and big-time defenders are different breeds, it seems like, and all the personality seems to settle on the side of the largest compensation package. So what you’re going to have is a prosecution team of Hurlburt, plus some other Colorado gummit lawyer types with big case experience, and a defense team composed of smart, brutal, charismatic vampires, the kinds of people who are so talented and so convincing that they pull down more in a month than Hurlburt sees in a year. Add to that Kobe, who looks too damned pretty to rape anybody, and his sympathetic wife sitting in the front row, and you have the legal equivalent of the Lakers vs. last year’s Nuggets. Both teams are comprised of professionals, but some professionals are a little better than others.

7: When it’s over, we’re still not going to know for sure what happened. And Kobe’s still not going to know for sure what the inside of a prison looks like. Unless there’s evidence and a scenario we don’t know about yet, and considering how little we actually know….