I’ve been following the Kobe Bryant rape case with interest–because I’m convinced that what happened last summer with his 20-year-old accuser in that Colorado hotel room wasn’t rape but consensual sex.


Yesterday the Colorado Supreme Court refused to review a ruling by the trial judge that the alleged victim’s sexual activity around the time of her encounter with the Los Angeles Lakers guard was relevant to his defense. That means that the defense can present DNA evidence that the woman had sexual intercourse with another man between the time she left his hotel room and the time she went to the police for a medical exam. According to leaked transcripts from a closed-door hearing, the prosecution contends that the woman mistakenly put on a pair of underpants unlaundered after a previous sexual encounter before heading for the exam. If I were a juror in the Bryant trial, I’d be rolling my eyes after I heard that one.


What with leaks of this nature, the alleged victim’s case against Bryant has been falling apart for some time. My theory is that either the sex she had with Bryant either wasn’t as much fun as she’d expected or he didn’t: 1) ask her to spend the night, 2) suggest a dinner date the next evening, or 3) offer to take her on a shopping spree with his credit card. Guys: Always ask the gal if the earth moved for her, too. The prosecutors recently lost a motion to delay the trial indefinitely–as well they should have, since when I last looked, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the criminally accused a speedy trial. Since Bryant faces a possible life sentence if convicted of felony sexual assault, he deserves to have this matter cleared up as expeditiously as possible.


It didn’t help that the woman filed a federal civil suit for damages against Bryant last week, leading one to the inescapable conclusion that her main motive was to tap into his wallet. The federal judge, Richard Matsch, seems a bit suspicious of the whole operation, too. He’s given the woman’s lawyer 30 days to come up with a convincing explanation why they should be allowed to proceed with the civil suit without disclosing her name.


Highly a propos of the Bryant case, National Review Online columnist Meghan Gurdon has a review in today’s Wall Street Journal of Big Sister: How Extreme Feminism Has Retarded the Fight for Women’s Equality, by Neil Boyd, a professor of criminology at Canada’s Simon Fraser University. Part of the inspiration for Boyd’s book was a 1997 incident in which a female student accused a Simon Fraser swimming coach of having raped her. The university convened a sexual harassment hearing and then fired the coach without taking any testimony from him. Then it emerged that the young woman had actually been harassing the coach. Boyd writes:


“The university president refused to change his position, even in the face of the overwhelming evidence….[T]he university lawyer, an aggressive feminist, initially chided the press for supposing that women ever lie about such events.”


Meghan comments:


“This sort of travesty is hardly news anymore, so frequently do such stories appear. Real men lose their jobs and even go to jail while real women reap fabulous jury awards for often spurious claims of emotional distress caused by ‘hostile work environments,’ ‘unwanted sexual advances’ and, most chillingly, ‘recovered memories’ of phantasmagoric incest revealed through hypnosis.”


Fortunately, as Meghan points out–and as the turn the Bryant case has taken–people have now become skeptical of the proposition that every rape accusation has to be true because men are by definition misogynistic brutes. That won’t prevent the sour sisters of radical feminism from continuing their indoctrination efforts, but I think they’re going to have a tougher time in the future persuading people to take them seriously.