The Shiv in the Hand of Kindness

After the death of basketball legend Kobe Bryant, a story of compassion in the age of Twitter mobs

A Studio City mural depicting Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, by L.A. artist Art Gozukuchikyan (Artoon)

Note: Because Sarah and I will be discussing the latest drama involving Washington Post writer Felicia Sonmez, here is a piece I wrote about some of her previous dramas - N.R.

Let’s talk about piggybacking onto trauma, about inserting yourself into the story, about fanning the debate, about petitioning for solace, about recognizing the inescapable pain of others and taking a little portion for yourself. If cultural appropriation is seen as grotesque and harmful and a sign of privilege, appropriating pain has become all the rage, something that elicits for the practitioner solicitations of “I’m so sorry this happened to you…” and rejoinders about personal bravery. If, by chance (but what are the chances?), there is no ready pain available, you can recycle something from the past, massage what’s at hand, blow new life into it, in other words, pain is pain is pain, and anyone doubting this does so at their own risk. But why doubt, when this empathy substitute, this Sweet‘N Low of caring, tastes so delightful? As does its corollary/can’t-have-one-without-the-other, an appetite for the public destruction of others.

At about 9:45 a.m. on January 26th, a helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and seven other people crashed into a hillside in Calabasas. All onboard were killed. Three hours later, Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez tweeted a link to a 2016 Daily Beast article with the headline, “Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.” Many thought it heartless to tweet about the 2003 sexual assault case (later dismissed) against Bryant; to provide neither comment nor context, when, in the words of one commenter, “the helicopter was still on fire.” As is the case in Twitter flame-wars, Sonmez found herself under attack.

“Well THAT was eye-opening,” she tweeted a few hours later, indicating, perhaps, an unfamiliarity with the process. “To the 10,000 people (literally) who have commented and emailed me with abuse and death threats, please take a moment to read the story — which was written 3+ years ago, and not by me. Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality…”

It was 3 a.m. in New Delhi and Jonathan Kaiman was just dozing off when he received a text from a friend, telling him to check Sonmez’s Twitter feed. Kaiman felt his heart stop for a second and thought, What has she done now? He went online and saw her tweet linking the Daily Beast piece. He learned at that moment that Kobe Bryant had been killed. He saw that Sonmez had something like 400 comments and 100 retweets and that people seemed angry at her. When he checked 20 minutes later, there were more than a thousand comments. He thought how weird it was to see Sonmez under siege, how a mobbing is never good. The next time he checked, there were something like 10,000 comments and a new tweet by Sonmez, about how the abuse had been eye-opening, which was when Kaiman decided to go back to bed.

Sonmez’s tweets did not sit well with her bosses. She was asked to delete them. She did, but was nevertheless put on suspension, purportedly for posting a screenshot that revealed readers’ personal information and tweeting outside her scope as a national political reporter.

The suspension set off a media firestorm, with major news outlets expressing outrage at the paper’s lack of support for Sonmez. A New York Times op-ed would wonder whether Post executive editor Marty Baron had “inquired about Ms. Sonmez’s safety when he emailed her to criticize her tweets?” Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote, “If journalists at the Post are prone to suspension for tweeting stories off their beats, the entire newsroom should be on administrative leave,” and closed with the paper’s mission statement: “The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.”

The Post had acted badly, or at least haphazardly, in suspending Sonmez, who was reinstated the next day. There had been intense pressure to do so, including a Washington Post Guild letter in support of Sonmez, urging the paper to “provide her with any resources she may request as she navigates this traumatic experience” and characterizing her as “a survivor of assault who bravely came forward with her story two years ago.”

The characterization as survivor was embedded in Sonmez’s last-deleted tweet on the Bryant issue: “That folks are responding with rage & threats toward me… speaks volumes about the pressure people come under to stay silent in these cases.”

Back in New Delhi, Charlotte Arneson saw the tweet and thought, No one has ever silenced Felicia, she’s only ever been enabled. Arneson further knew what was about to befall Kaiman, her boyfriend of three years. They’d been through it before. Every time Sonmez brought herself into a story, the reason she had the credibility to do so washed back over them. Arneson saw the irony in Sonmez saying people were “worth remembering in their totality,” when Kaiman would never be remembered in his; when he would remain a media abstraction for the rest of his life.

We are not at our best when we dehumanize people; when, through animus or politics or ideologies, we turn them into punching bags or cautionary tales. And so, with the idea that it is kinder to remember people in their totality, let’s do that. Let’s look at someone you’ve maybe made up your mind about, and if not about this person specifically, then people like them, people holding up a corner of the edifice we’ve been building for a few years now, people we might not be keen to show interest in or humanity toward—I mean, fuck them. But let’s do it anyway.

In September 2017, Sonmez was 34 and living in Beijing. She and Kaiman, Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, were at a party with other journalists. They drank a good deal and started to kiss, after which Sonmez loaded Kaiman onto her scooter and drove them to his apartment, where they had sex. She left afterward and drove herself home.

On January 10, 2018, a former housemate of Kaiman’s named Laura Tucker posted an essay on Medium, recounting a 2013 sexual encounter with Kaiman that left her feeling “gross.” She’d felt “pressured” by Kaiman at the time and now wanted to “add my voice to the broader outcry against sexual misconduct.”

The accusation broadsided Kaiman, as did being contacted the next day by Sonmez, who’d read Tucker’s essay and wanted to express her misgivings about their own encounter — misgivings she later sent in a letter to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, where Kaiman was then president.

“Even though parts of the evening were consensual, while on the way, Jon escalated things in a way that crossed the line,” she wrote, and specifically of his reaching under her skirt during the scooter ride. “Many parts of the night remain hazy. I am devastated by the fact that I was not more sober so that I could say with absolute certainty whether what happened that night was rape.”

Sonmez did not need to say with absolute certainly whether what happened that night was rape. Based on her allegation, Kaiman was forced out of his club presidency at FCCC and, in May, suspended from his job. In August, the LA Times notified him that his “treatment of women brought undue negative publicity” to the company and that he’d be fired if he did not resign.

Writing of his resignation, The New York Times noted that, “Mr. Kaiman has disputed the allegations and said that ‘all acts we engaged in were mutually consensual’” — a position that, with #MeToo in full force, would prove unsustainable, a sign the accused had learned nothing, if not as a further act of aggression.

Whether Sonmez took it either way was unclear. “I knew that not speaking out about it was going to do far more damage,” she said, after Kaiman released a statement explaining how the allegations “have irrevocably destroyed my reputation, my professional network, my nine year career in journalism, and any hope for a rewarding career in the future; they have branded me with a scarlet letter for life, and driven me to the brink of suicide.”

Sonmez did not file criminal charges against Kaiman. Doing so would in some ways have been redundant, when trial by internet was fast and free lived in perpetuity. There may too have been a sixth sense that looking beyond the version of events on record might prove destabilizing, might challenge how you treated your fellow man, who, by these lights, might someday be you.

Kaiman woke up to read that Sonmez had been suspended. There appeared still to be a good deal of anger toward her on social media, if none that he could see from blue checkmark Twitterati. It was déjà vu all over again, numerous articles re-upping the allegations against him, stripping them of context: Kaiman was a man justly brought down by #MeToo, the end.

One journalist did reach out to Kaiman. Erik Wemple emailed that he did not want to get into the nitty-gritty of the past but wondered if Kaiman had a statement about what was happening to Sonmez now. Kaiman paraphrased an earlier tweet of his own — “Last year, when I was being publicly shamed, I said that I wouldn’t wish trial by Twitter on anybody. I stand by that statement. It is a kind of hell” — and told Wemple he could use that. He further said Wemple could take any quote from the 2019 investigative piece Emily Yoffe had written for Reason magazine, the only article that had given a fuller account of what took place between him and Sonmez.

Wemple did neither. Instead, he quoted Kaiman telling The New York Times in 2018 that the situation had left him suicidal. This was maddening. Kaiman had expressed he wished the mob on no one, including the person who’d unleashed one on him, and it was deemed not worth mentioning. Who did it serve to lean away from compassion?

Also crazy-making: an article in that day’s Times that included a section about Sonmez accusing Yoffe and Reason of “‘basic’ factual errors”. The article also cited Caitlin Flanagan agreeing, on an episode of the podcast Femsplainers, that Sonmez’s accusations might have been spurred by Kaiman not following up after their encounter, in part because he was already in a relationship with Arneson — a suggestion that spurred Sonmez to tweet a copy of a letter she sent to Flanagan’s editors at The Atlantic, urging that Flanagan be fired. In an updated version of Times article, the section had been cut.

They memory folded it, thought Kaiman. It was the accumulation of things like this that made him feel as if he were in epistemological outer space, where truth and social and professional physics ceased to exist.

Let’s talk about timing; timing is everything. Tucker posted her Medium essay about her 2013 encounter with Kaiman on January 10, 2018. Let’s say, four months into the #MeToo era, she felt supported enough to do so. Sonmez came at Kaiman the following day, arguably a bad and confusing day for him. Still, the time was right, when seemingly every day brought a new story of another powerful abuser vanquished, some maybe not so powerful or abusive, some maybe tossed onto the bonfire not so much in retribution as to take part in the movement, to make it grow, to make it glow, to be united, to not be silenced, to confer status and maybe make you a little high. To keep it going you needed to stay on point, to stay vigilant, to pick the right vehicles to carry the message, and the faster the better. A sports hero and his child dying horrifically is a fast vehicle. And if your timing made some people a little queasy, made them question your motive at choosing this moment, it was no thing to counter that the insinuation only proved your point, that the world was misogynistic and ever ready to re-victimize victims, as evidenced by you yourself being one again.

Two days after her initial tweet and one day after her reinstatement, Sonmez published a letter to Marty Baron, asking him to explain her 24-hour suspension and hoping he and “newsroom leaders” would “not only prioritize their employees’ safety in the face of threats of physical harm but also ensure that no journalist will be punished for speaking the truth.” This was the same Marty Baron who oversaw the years-long Spotlight investigation at the Boston Globe, which uncovered serial sexual abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese and brought some measure of justice to thousands of men and women who’d been sexually abused as children — a fact those raising their voices in support of Sonmez either never knew or did not think germane to the cause of keeping women safe, a cause Sonmez was understood to be championing.

Others did not see it this way. “Nine people died in a helicopter crash, but this WaPo reporter is the real victim,” tweeted Jon Gabriel, editor-in-chief of Ricochet. Pseudonymous podcaster @neontaster tweeted, “I’m so sorry, Felicia. This helicopter crash has been really hard on you.” Lindsey Granger, host of Daily Blast Live, took Sonmez somewhat to task, saying, “She was being attacked on Twitter for tweeting a link that basically was condemning Kobe’s character and accusing him of rape. But I think her job as a journalist was to put that in context. You have the responsibility, and you need to have the journalistic acumen, to write the full story. Go to the Washington Post and say, ‘This man is a nuanced character, this man has a detailed, layered history that we need to discuss.’ But don’t just tweet that out… Don’t hide behind somebody else’s article.”

The “don’t hide” comment cast Sonmez as a journalist unwilling to expend effort. This is inaccurate. The piece she retweeted appeared chosen with care. Not much more than statements Bryant and his accuser gave police, it presented a stark portraiture, there was a clear villain and a clear victim. That the story would later prove more complicated, you would not learn from this version of events—nevertheless, there was efficacy in the choice, if an unambiguous narrative was the one that made the most sense to you, the one that got you where you wanted to go.

Did Sonmez see it as her mandate, as someone whose public identity was partially wrapped in that of a victim, to resurface this particular story? And what of her own story? Was it one of regret sex that left one or both parties feeling icky, a drunken hook-up that the culture wars had turned into the hill we were all supposed to die on? Could it not have been settled with a phone call between two adults? Did it demand all our attention, when it was our attention that was animating it, that kept it lurching through the halls of social media, a Frankenstein that knocked people down and kept knocking them down so long as we kept building it up?

Kaiman understood he would be dragged onstage whenever someone deemed him useful in the fight against the next perpetrator, or all next perpetrators. He’d accepted that anytime someone Googled him, the first thing they’d see was the rape allegation. He knew this kept him, at 33, all but unemployable; that the life he’d carved out for himself — the position at a major newspaper, the book deal his publisher cancelled, citing a morals clause — was gone. He tried to remain sanguine as the current news cycle further elevated Sonmez as a martyr for free speech and an exemplar of what #BelieveWomen can achieve.

Arneson was not sanguine. She did not think being a woman entitled you to unconditional belief, thought it crazy to believe any demographic was entitled to unconditional belief. She wanted people to consider the details, the fact that Sonmez insisted Kaiman get on her scooter, that she walked up six flights of stairs to his apartment, that she gave him a blowjob after they had sex; Sonmez had never disputed any of this. Why wouldn’t the newspapers print it?

She thought about something Coleman Hughes had written, how journalists and public commentators were more concerned with being seen on the right side of the culture wars than on the right side of the truth; that the truth had become, if not irrelevant, then a potential impediment to one’s chosen cause. But wasn’t the cause of journalism to look through the widest lens? The only person that had done any investigation was Emily Yoffe and she was called a bad journalist for doing so. And Caitlin Flanagan had straight-up asked Sonmez, “What do you want?”

Arneson wanted to know what Sonmez wanted. How much suffering was enough? What did Kaiman need to do in order to be allowed to live his life? Did he need to go into Times Square and lash himself 50 times? Kaiman had sometimes wondered if Sonmez wanted him to go to jail.

Arneson was familiar with the concept of virtual punishment, and the work being done by Aya Gruber, a feminist law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Reading Gruber, Arneson saw carceral feminism as having evolved into #MeToo feminism, which increasingly distrusted a patriarchal state to recognize crimes against women and thus leapfrogged the justice system, instead having punishment meted out by Twitter and media personalities, by colleges and companies; that a small if vocal segment of the chattering class felt this would lead to a more fair and just society, which Arneson had for more than two years seen in action and knew led to no such thing.

Since January 2018, she and Kaiman had lived isolated lives, staying first with his parents, then with hers, coming to New Delhi in 2019 after a friend offered Kaiman a little work. They had lost many of their friends, who had not wanted to appear in league with Kaiman, as though his shame, somehow, would splash onto them. Arneson knew she and Kaiman had experienced a kind of social death; she sometimes felt like a ghost in her own life. Kaiman thought of it as being adrift at sea; the farther you drifted out, the harder it was to get back, and while it seemed like dead-calm in all directions, this was an illusion, since you might wake up at three the next morning to find everything crashing down again.

Let’s talk of proportionality, of punishment befitting the crime. Let’s consider that offering support via a retweet, via a like, can have ramifications you will never see, can send people into exile, can leave them spiritually broken, can sometimes push them to suicide. It is understandable that you might not feel responsible for bad outcomes. You likely did not know the accused (or the accuser) in the first place and also, all you did was press a button, leave a sharp comment, signal a little solidarity. What happens after that is neither your concern nor your fault. Okay. Then whose is it?

Let’s also consider that people in psychological pain can spread pain. Pain can become a sharing factor. People do this spontaneously. Seeking relief, they are impelled to talk, to say, this happened to me, too, and this is a beautiful thing, except when it isn’t; except when the pain turns rancid, when we look at others in pain and say, they deserve it.

Perhaps the outpouring of grief for Bryant and his daughter appeared to Sonmez undeserved; a further insult to abuse survivors that she might deflect with a tweet. Instead, the internet disgorged hate—on her, on her editors, on Kaiman, on Bryant; dividing lines were further entrenched, there were few if any moments of grace.

Compare this to what happened when people learned of the helicopter crash, the untold millions who broke down, people within hours channeling their grief, painting murals of Bryant and Gigi, baking cakes in Bryant’s image, playing cello center-court at Staples Center, gathering as hundreds of mariachis paid tribute. The scope and intensity and complexity of what was created in the wake of Bryant’s death showed what pain also can do.

Some who mourned no doubt knew that Bryant had been accused of sexual assault, knew he was a flawed man, which Bryant himself acknowledged and apologized for. Maybe people forgave him. Maybe they did not think it was up to them to forgive him; maybe they decided they were not going to blot out 41 years of a life based on an incident they were not there to witness. Maybe they knew that doing that would not alleviate anyone’s pain, that the way to do that was to open your hand.

Kaiman and Arneson in many ways considered themselves fortunate. Their families had been phenomenal, as were the friends who’d stuck by them. They tried not to forget this. They tried to focus on the future. They’d each applied to law school. Kaiman had some work, and he and Arneson had the usual young adult dreams, to maybe buy a house, to have a family.

They dreamed, too, of a building a project for people who found themselves where Kaiman had been, people set upon by mobs, people seeing their lives atomized, sometimes overnight; a free resource people could reach out to, in the first hours and days, when people felt as if they were in freefall, and also afterwards. Kaiman knew there was no roadmap showing how to navigate this stuff, and if he could help those as terrified as he’d once been, he would.

Kaiman and Arneson were not alone in seeing a need for such a project. They knew attorneys and media people, social scientists and mental health professionals, were sounding the alarm at the tribunal the digital realm had ushered in, at the rate and voracity with which people publicly shredded others; who saw these campaigns not as progress but performative, and if this was the way people wanted it to go, why not just issue everyone a machete and set them out on the streets?

Let’s talk about what we’re here for. Is it to slaughter one another and bathe in the blood of our enemies? It’s hard to see this as the right way forward and also, what is created? Aside from a giant mess. Go ahead and disagree with people; that can be a good thing, even a moral obligation. You can try to hold people accountable. You can listen. You can learn your blind spots from people you initially take for blind. You can change your mind. You can understand that if we take hate as our dance partner it’s going to be a rotten time all around, that it will be way more munificent to tilt toward joy. Start with yourself.

This piece was originally published on Arc Digital