In civil lawsuit, alleged victim bids for anonymity

By Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
August 28, 2004

Kobe Bryant's alleged victim has received death threats and has been humiliated by publicity about her sex life, her lawyers argued in asking a federal judge to keep her name secret in her civil lawsuit against the basketball star.

"Plaintiff seeks anonymity here because she justifiably fears for her safety and reputation if her identity is made known," the woman's lawyers said in urging that she be identified only as "Jane Doe" in her federal civil suit against Bryant.

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The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages for sexual assault.

"Since the filing of the criminal case, plaintiff has been the subject of death threats, the media has disseminated the most intimate details of her private life and, through inexcusable mistakes by the Eagle County Court, false and/or highly prejudicial accusations about her purported sex life have been released for public consumption," the lawyers said.

The argument was made public Friday - as hundreds of potential jurors began answering questionnaires for Bryant's criminal rape trial in Eagle County - when the woman's lawyers turned over a previously secret civil court document to news organizations that had asked a judge to make the document public.

Colorado U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch had not ruled on the news organizations' request when the woman's lawyers conceded Wednesday that the document - called a "Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Proceed Anonymously as a 'Jane Doe' Plaintiff" - should not remain sealed.

The memorandum was filed under seal Aug. 10, the same day the woman sued Bryant in Colorado U.S. District Court.

The Rocky Mountain News and 10 other organizations argued that they needed to review the memorandum of law in order to decide whether to oppose the woman's request to be identified only as "Jane Doe" in her civil lawsuit against Bryant.

"The tawdry and sensational and often false accusations abounding in the media are humiliating and degrading," the woman's lawyers said in the memorandum.

They noted that two people have been imprisoned after threatening to kill the woman. Iowa college student John Roche is in prison in Chicago for threatening in a drunken, obscenity-laced telephone call to the woman's home to kill her with a coat hanger. Swiss bodybuilder Patrick Graber, who allegedly offered to kill the woman for $3 million, has been sentenced to three years in jail in California and is expected to be deported when he finishes serving the sentence.

Charges of threatening to kill the woman are pending against a third man, Cedric Augustine, of California, in Colorado U.S. District Court.

Eagle County District Court, where Bryant is on trial for raping the woman, accidentally made her name public twice in documents posted on the court Web site. The woman's name also appears in various locations on the Internet.

Bryant, a star player with the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association, is a multimillionaire. He is 26.

Bryant, who is married, has admitted having sex with the woman, then 19, on June 30, 2003, while he was staying at a hotel where she worked. Bryant has insisted that the encounter was consensual.

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