People can learn from their mistakes. Seems like he did, so people are more remembering the good things because he did a lot of positivity for the community afterwards. Does that excuse his history no. He should always have that taint that he did rape some one. But there has to be Some nuance as to how people go about their lives in society. But one thing is for sure everyone is stubborn in how they express their opinions.
Where do we draw the line of letting criminals out of jail to integrate into society to better themselves or just label them as a criminal who will always do crimes. What is the point of even implementing a correction system in prisons if we won't let past criminals integrate into Society.
But when you look at the other side of it. The victim will always be a victim to the crime no matter what sentence is implemented on the criminal. The pain will always be there and people who have a more inert ability to empathize with them will always have strong feelings against the criminal no matter what the criminal does. To them once a criminal always a criminal. It's ok to have that response as well as the victim should be more important than the criminal.
So I think it's ok for either extremes. But I think it's ok for the middle guy too. Unfortunately disagreements always just end up turning ugly these days because people just can't stand other people having differing opinions to their own.
This is a big issue with Kobe, though. Kobe did NOT go to jail, he did not serve time for the crime, and he did NOT go through the "correction" system. He bullied the witness into silence and then paid for her future silence to avoid accountability.
As someone else said, yes, we "learn from our mistakes'... but we're so cavalier about RAPE being a mistake to "learn from". Like raping someone and learning not to do that and be a better person is some character-building moment of courage and a comeback narrative to root for.
I had a coworker who defended Bill Cosby, saying that he was such a net positive in the world that the rapes shouldn't matter. Whether it was one time or dozens of times, Cosby did so much good for the community.
At his trial:
" "I can only speak to the great man that I know and love, who has been so generous, who has been such a philanthropist and giving back millions of dollars to education and schools," the now 38-year-old actress Keshia Knight-Pulliam told reporters.
Friends and family vouched that he was kind and generous, a devoted family man with five beautiful children. Millions spent on community centers and charitable deeds.
And that was often the defense used. "What about his family?" "What about his children?" "What about his friends and fans?" "What about his legacy?"
And so many failed to ever ask "what about his victims?"
Even fewer asked about all the victims of abuse that never come forward who routinely watch men in power get away with it.
THIS is why it's important to shift away from the "middle" of these type of conversations. Kobe's actions weren't just a one-off incident in our society but a systematic example of the failure of the system to bring justice to victims of sexual assault. He never served his time, he bullied his accuser into silence, within a year he was back to being the 2nd highest-paid sponsored athlete in the world, he "moved on" to be a family man with success and praise and accolades whose own vanity project won him an Oscar while his public image healed in record time...
... While if his victim was anything like the women I know, she watched all this while handling trust issues, paying for psychiatry visits, dealing with death threats, and waking up every morning knowing he was on TV talking about how wonderful his life was.
If we're going to talk "nuance", it's that if Kobe Bryant wasn't a beloved athlete with high-paid lawyers, he'd still be serving time in jail and would be considered a pariah everywhere he went.
