If the accused is named, the accuser should be too

Kobe Bryant’s name has been plastered all over the media ever since authorities in Colorado disclosed that he’d been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman.

His name and face have been on Page 1 of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times -- among others -- and on the network news and local news, and it’s virtually impossible to listen to any sports talk show and not hear his name over and over.

But as I write this -- on Wednesday, because of early printing deadlines for Sunday Calendar -- the name of the woman he’s been accused of assaulting has not been published or broadcast by any reputable news organization.

Why not?

It’s not because reporters don’t know her name. In a town as small as Eagle, Colo. (population 3,500), people figured out who she was almost instantly. Reporters talked to her father, tried to interview her ex-boyfriend and laid siege to her house. Over the past week, several of her friends have talked about her on television, and other “friends” told the Orange County Register that she’d been rushed to the hospital after overdosing on pills two months before meeting Bryant.

But most reputable news organizations -- including The Times -- have policies against using the names of victims of alleged sexual assaults. The media believe that the stigma -- the public embarrassment -- attached to being so identified is overwhelming and ineradicable, and virtually amounts to a second violation of the woman, a second rape. Withholding the victim’s name is seen as a sensitive, humanitarian gesture, designed to protect the woman’s privacy, especially at a time of maximum vulnerability.

That stigma is thought to exist even when it is immediately and incontrovertibly apparent that the victim bears absolutely no responsibility for the circumstances that made the attack possible. Even if she gets raped in broad daylight -- in a good neighborhood, by a complete stranger, in front of three eyewitnesses -- our societal attitudes toward sex are such that she will still bear some stigma. Or so it is argued by news executives, many rape counselors and other women.

But in Bryant’s case, it was not immediately and incontrovertibly apparent that the victim bears absolutely no responsibility for the circumstances that made the alleged attack possible. She did go to his room late at night. That is incontrovertible.

Implication and stigma

That does not mean she was “asking for it,” as some radio talk show guests have said, and it does not mean that if Bryant did rape her, he was in any way justified in doing so. When a woman says “No” -- whenever she says it, in whatever circumstances she says it, no matter what she may have said or done leading to that moment -- “No” means “No.” Any attempt to physically coerce the woman’s cooperation or submission is reprehensible -- both morally and legally wrong -- and the perpetrator should be severely punished by our criminal justice system.

But Bryant, while admitting adultery, insists he did not force her. He says the sex was consensual.

Suppose the courts decide that he’s right. Suppose that a jury acquits him. Or suppose that charges are dropped. He will have been accused of a sexual assault, and that accusation will have lingered in the public consciousness for several months -- and will, in all likelihood, remain attached to his name for the rest of his life.

Even if he’s found guilty in court, he will have been tainted with the implication of guilt for months before that verdict, just by virtue of having his name out there as the accused, while his accuser’s name was withheld.

Surely, the stigma attached to being accused of sexual assault is even worse than the stigma attached to being a victim of sexual assault. So why publish and broadcast his name and not hers? She’s not a minor, and since everyone in her hometown knows who she is, just whom are we protecting her reputation from?

Indeed, it could be argued that by withholding her name, we’re exacerbating, not avoiding, the stigma. I know many women who feel that way.

As my colleague Sandy Banks wrote in these pages last summer, the prohibition on identifying rape victims is “a holdover from less enlightened times,” when we neither talked about rape nor wrote about it and when it was almost automatically assumed that a woman was “a party to the crime.”

These days, Banks argued, “we profess to understand that rape is not about sex, but about violence and rage and that the victim is no more to blame than someone held up for money at the point of a gun.”

Geneva Overholser, a former newspaper editor and ombudsman who is now a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, says rape victims “still face a special and unfair and cruel burden in society,” but she agrees with Banks that women and society have “moved a long way” and says, “It’s time we acknowledged that by naming the accuser, just as we name the accused.”

In 1991, Overholser’s Des Moines Register won a Pulitzer Prize for public service after publishing a series of articles that, with the victim’s consent, named a woman who had been raped and told the story of her ordeal and recovery.

Overholser had hoped that series would spark a reconsideration of the policy of anonymity in the mainstream media, and she’s disappointed that hasn’t happened.

In the Bryant case, she says, not naming the accuser is “a conceit

Liberate victims

In fact, various Web sites and Internet message boards have already posted what they say is her name, and that same name has been broadcast nationally by Tom Leykis, a Los Angeles-based syndicated radio talk-show host with a much-less-than-Limbaugh-size audience and a penchant for mean-spirited misogyny. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time you’re reading this, one of the tabloids or some other down-and-dirty, quasi-news organization will also have used it. Then -- if it hasn’t already happened -- all the mainstream media will say, “Well, her name is out there; we have to use it now too.”

That would be the right decision -- made for the wrong reason.

Newspaper and magazine editors and television news directors should decide what to publish or broadcast based on their own standards and their own sense of journalism ethics, not because an executive at another, generally lesser news organization decided to do so for salacious, competitive and/or attention-getting reasons.

Obviously, these decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis. I’m not saying rape victims should always be named. But in the Bryant case, as in many -- perhaps most -- others, I do think it’s time to liberate rape victims from any residual societal embarrassment by treating them as we treat the adult victims of every other crime. If we disseminate the name of the accused, we should do likewise with the name of the accuser.

Journalists like to argue that sunlight is the best disinfectant. That’s why we argue in favor of laws requiring open meetings and open records and full public disclosure. Sunlight, not secrecy, is our watchword, and it should be as potent a disinfectant when used against social stigma as it is when used against political corruption.

The American judicial system guarantees that anyone accused of a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty. That same system also guarantees that anyone accused of a crime has the right to confront his accuser. We adhere to both these guarantees in a court of law. We should extend those guarantees to the court of public opinion, where verdicts are often more enduring -- and more painful -- than those rendered in a courtroom.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.