Fourteen months after she accused Kobe Bryant of raping her, a young Colorado woman sat on the witness stand testifying about the encounter, answering probing personal questions and trying to explain sketchy details.
But the scene did not play out in this tiny mountain community, where the national media were gathering to cover the trial.
Instead it occurred in secret, two hours away at the Jefferson County Courthouse in the Denver suburb of Golden, where prosecutors staged a mock trial two days before jury selection was to begin. They wanted to gauge how their chief witness would hold up under hostile cross-examination.
The answer: disastrously.
For more than three hours, a lawyer playing the role of Bryant defense attorney Pamela Mackey pounded away at the accuser and the account she had given police. The lawyer pointed out that in her police statement the woman said she had kissed Bryant consensually for five minutes before the alleged assault.
“All right, let’s start now,” the lawyer said, looking at his watch.
For the next 60 seconds the courtroom was silent.
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“You’re still kissing him,” the lawyer broke in, continuing to look at his watch. “You kissed him for four more minutes.”
“That’s too long,” she responded. “We didn’t kiss that long.”
The lawyer pounced: “Well, you said five minutes.”
The woman crumbled, and seven days later so did the criminal case against Bryant, superstar guard of the Los Angeles Lakers.
“She was cut open,” said Ingrid Bakke, a prosecutor who was present. “The mock exam was a big turning point for her.”
The 20-year-old accuser had wavered for months about testifying, overwhelmed by death threats, media scrutiny and repeated court gaffes that disclosed her name and explosive sealed testimony.
As her family shifted from a shielding posture to a more aggressive one, she became the subject of a tug-of-war between her private attorneys, who wanted her out of the criminal case, and prosecutors, who pushed to proceed with a trial even as two of them had quit talking to each other.
Cementing the woman’s decision to withdraw was an apology from Bryant–direct, public and painstakingly fashioned in secret talks. At no time was there a discussion of money, according to sources involved with the accuser and the defense. The woman has filed a civil suit against Bryant.
Mackey said neither she nor anyone at her law firm would comment, citing ethical obligations. Defense sources who spoke did so on the condition of anonymity. Bryant and the accuser declined to be interviewed.
After the woman stepped down from the witness stand Aug. 25 in Golden, lead prosecutor Dana Easter suggested the defense be notified in writing that she had changed her story about how long she had kissed Bryant. Less than a month earlier, the woman had written a letter admitting she had been dishonest about two other details.
Bakke openly disagreed, and Lin Wood, an attorney for the accuser, sided with Bakke. “If you file one more letter saying she’s changing her story, you’ll destroy her as a witness before she ever has a chance to take the stand,” Wood said angrily.
Wood had wanted the accuser to withdraw since joining her legal team in early July.
“I had visions of Kobe Bryant coming out of court waving the victory sign and saying `One down, one to go,'” Wood said, referring to the criminal and civil cases. “And this girl would walk away remembered as the young girl who falsely accused Kobe Bryant.”
Her other lawyer, former Eagle County prosecutor John Clune, had maintained that she should testify–until the mock exam convinced him otherwise.
“The three of us knew the plug had to be pulled,” Wood said. “The question was, can we get there?”
The rape allegedly occurred June 30, 2003, in Bryant’s room at the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera, where the accuser worked at the front desk and Bryant stayed while having surgery nearby.
In the most consequential blunder, a court reporter e-mailed to seven news organizations transcripts from a closed hearing in late June dealing with DNA evidence. When Judge Terry Ruckriegle, under pressure from the Supreme Court, decided to release the sealed transcripts, the accuser’s parents reached a breaking point.
The hearing featured testimony from a defense expert who said DNA results suggested the accuser had sex with someone other than Bryant after the alleged rape and before her medical exam the next day. It would have raised questions about the origin of injuries allegedly caused by Bryant.
Clune adamantly had denied this suggestion when it surfaced at the October 2003 preliminary hearing. But he and Wood believed the release of the transcripts would trigger a new round of damaging headlines and poison the small Eagle County jury pool.
They were right. The bulk of the DNA hearing transcripts were released Aug. 2, stirring a torrent of negative media about the woman’s alleged sexual activities.
With the sealed transcripts released and the trial looming, Clune and O’Connor quietly resumed their talks. By the second week of August they agreed that if Bryant were to sign a formal apology, she would not testify.
Clune stipulated that Bryant’s words had to be directed to his accuser and include three elements:
– An acknowledgment that he knew her allegations were not made up.
– That she was not motivated by money.
– That Bryant understood why she reported an assault to the police.
Meanwhile, infighting between Easter and Bakke over who would conduct the direct exam at trial had gotten so bad that the two prosecutors stopped talking to each other.
“Their inability to even come to an agreement on who would handle her exam days before the start of the trial was a significant factor” in the accuser’s decision to pull out of the case, Wood said.
Problems also were arising in the apology negotiations. O’Connor called Clune on the eve of an Aug. 20 deadline with a statement that promptly was rejected by the accuser.
“There was an apology for what she had been through but not for his behavior,” Clune said. “It required a strong statement from Bryant, and they were unwilling to make it.”
Clune informed O’Connor and Hurlbert that the woman was ready for trial. But when he returned to his office, Clune had a voice mail from chief defense lawyer Hal Haddon, who said Bryant would apologize–that Clune just needed to specify the language.
Wood said he recognized Haddon’s involvement as a turning point.
“Haddon called her bluff,” he said. “And she wasn’t bluffing.”
Mackey, meanwhile, continued to prepare for trial, and defense sources said she was confident a jury would find enough reasonable doubt to acquit Bryant.
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Like prosecutors, she was unaware that apology negotiations had been revived.
Even the accuser was being kept in the dark.
“She had made her decision to testify,” Clune said. “Unless something so compelling happened, I wasn’t going to bring it up with her again.”
The mock trial provided a reason to do so.
Wood was incensed over what he viewed as the failure of prosecutors to prepare the woman adequately, saying she did not seem familiar even with her own statements to police.
“They tore down her confidence in an exercise that should be designed to build up her confidence,” Wood said.
When Wood and Clune reached the woman hours after the exam, Wood asked her what she would do if they could get a satisfactory apology.
“I would withdraw,” she replied.
Clune told her that a revised statement was in the works. Desperate to escape the trial, the woman expressed relief.
As jury selection began Aug. 27, a Friday, the woman flew back to Florida while Bakke and Easter joined other members of the prosecution team at a private home for final preparations.
Bakke rehearsed her opening statement, which included a graphic account of Bryant’s alleged actions.
Unknown to the attorneys on both sides girding for their court showdown, Clune was meeting with O’Connor and defense lawyer Mark Johnson, who had been authorized by Haddon to work out the final language.
By the time prosecutors emerged from the retreat, Johnson had agreed to a much stronger statement, while insisting that it include language establishing that it could not be used against Bryant in the civil case.
It began: First, I want to apologize directly to the young woman involved in this incident. I want to apologize to her for my behavior that night and for the consequences she has suffered in the past year.
When Clune called his client with the new wording, she accepted it without hesitation.
As potential jurors were being interviewed in the tiny courthouse and correspondents beamed live stand-ups from outside, Bryant agreed to the stronger apology language on Monday, Aug. 30.
Mackey initially objected, but reconsidered and Bryant signed the statement the next morning.
On Sept. 1, the woman called Hurlbert from Florida and told him she would not testify. Hurlbert, Bakke and other members of the prosecution team listened on a speakerphone. Hurlbert called her his hero. “Thank you very much,” the woman said, her voice trailing off.
“At that point, we were going to dismiss the case no matter what, even if the defense said they wouldn’t release the statement from Bryant,” Bakke said.
Wood, for his part, was elated, and quickly focused on aspects of the withdrawal agreement that could affect the civil suit. Johnson, the defense lawyer, wanted the case dismissed with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled.
Wood, too, wanted an assurance that Bryant could not be re-charged. He planned to depose Bryant in the civil suit, and removing the threat of future prosecution would limit Bryant’s ability to avoid testifying.
Later that day, Ruckriegle called an open hearing and dismissed the case.