On anger, compassion, and Kobe 💜
I made the mistake of speaking up for Kobe’s rape accuser on a Facebook post yesterday. I received a reply from a stranger named Doug (who assured me has “three daughters and lots and lots of female friends”).
“Kristi, prove it. The DA couldn’t. And why comment about it now? What have you done for the alleged victim over the last 14 years?”
Well, I stuck up for her twelve seconds ago, DOUG, I donate to women’s organizations monthly, wrestle with my internalized misogyny, and endure dumbass questions like yours all along the way. (Based off his photo, the only leaning in Doug does is on a slalom water ski across Utah Lake’s toxic algae. The metaphor really writes itself here.)
I was angry, but not at Doug. Doug’s an idiot. In my experience, when you’re angry at idiots, you’re projecting anger that’s sourced somewhere else. I believe rage can be holy—but to sanctify it, you must look at the source. I burrowed through my brain, past my throat, my heart, down into my molten core where reasons flow like magma.
There, I saw Joseph Smith coercing a fourteen-year old girl named Helen to marry him. He told her their union would ensure her family’s salvation—and gave her 24 hours to think about it. I saw him esteemed as a prophet. I saw generations of my ancestors singing “Praise to the Man.” In the mythology of Joseph, Helen is mere collateral damage.
Forty years later, I saw one of my namesakes—my great-great grandmother, Kerstina Nilsdotter—swallow her voice as her husband took a second wife in polygamy. Mary, her daughter-in-law, remembers visiting Kerstina late one night. She was alone, asleep in an old rocking chair in the kitchen.
“Where’s Dad?” Mary whispered.
“Over at Amy’s.”
Mary cried softly in the darkness. “Mother, I could never stand this unless the Lord came to me.”
“Mary,” she replied. “He came to me years ago.”
For endless reasons, Helen and Kerstina could not escape their lives in a religion built on misogyny. But I could, and I did, though no god came to me.
I’ve often wondered: do women matter?
If so, why are we so hateful when their lives cast shadows on men’s glory? Why do we control their bodies? Why do we shame and silence them?
Yesterday, I read the story of Kobe’s accuser as recorded in court documents. Many of the women in your life—including the one whose words you’re reading—have experienced the nightmare moment when a man’s hands, lips, body presses down with too much firmness. Do you care? Does it matter?
Do you care that I held my breath? Do you care that I felt my heartbeat in my eardrums? Do you care that even writing this, sitting here on my goddam couch seventeen years later, closing my eyes and going into this memory ignites my nervous system? Does it matter that a boy named Billy—who I am almost certain does not remember me—holds a key to my reptilian brain?
“She wasn’t that attractive,” Kobe said.
Kobe was accused of rape in 2003. Gigi was born in 2006. If Kobe had gone to jail—or even to trial—Gigi might not have been born. Sweet, sweet girl. Sitting courtside with her dad, playing ball with her dad, laughing with her dad.
It looked like she had a really good dad.
Yesterday, an accused rapist died in his private helicopter. Under normal circumstances, I might huff, thinking others are far more deserving of my compassion.
But I thought of Gigi and Kobe’s final moments. No man deserves to watch his daughter die in horror. What I came to feel, although at first it made me bristle, is that love is not a finite resource. Compassion for Kobe’s death does not diminish compassion for his accuser’s life. This is the frustrating beauty of the human experience. There are moments when our job is not to act as judge or jury but to embrace this transcendent ache.
Anger and compassion, justice and mercy—polarities have their purpose. But perhaps our most human moments are when we close those valves and say instead “Come, come, I can hold this, I can hold you. There is room in the cracks where my heart has broken.”
(This is the god that came to me.)
Thanks for reading Gemini Mind! Elsewhere, you can find me as @yokizzi 💫