DENVER, Colorado, 29 February 2004 — NBA star Kobe Bryant’s alleged rape victim has been ordered to appear in court for the first time next week to be grilled by the sports star’s lawyers, court documents showed Friday.
In a court motion filed Friday, Eagle County prosecutor Dana Easter confirmed reports that the 19-year-old woman has been subpoenaed for a pre-trial hearing in the Colorado town of Eagle on Tuesday.
The revelation came as a fan of Bryant was charged with threatening to kill victim and the prosecutor leading the rape and to blow up the courtroom where the case is being heard, court documents showed.
The hotel employee who claims she was sexually assaulted by Bryant in his room near Eagle on June 30 will be quizzed behind closed doors to determine whether a trial jury will be allowed to hear about her sexual conduct before the incident.
But prosecutors are moving swiftly to limit the Los Angeles Lakers guard’s lawyers’ questioning of the accuser as the defense tries to discredit her claim and bring her sexual and mental history into evidence.
The issue of her sexual past is one of several matters that will be dealt with in the latest of Bryant’s pre-trial hearings, aimed at shaping his trial, that will be held tomorrow and Tuesday. Easter’s motion accuses the defense of attempting to circumvent the state’s rape shield law, which protects the identity of an alleged victim, with the intent to “humiliate and embarrass” Bryant’s accuser.
“The victim has been the subject of humiliation, death threats and a complete disruption of her life,” the prosecutor said in her legal filing. “She has been followed and information has been given to the press to publish world wide and in her home town. Defense investigators have contacted every one of her friends and made them witnesses in order to question them about every private aspect of her life.”
Easter’s motion made reference to a previous defense filing claiming that the Bryant team has found witnesses willing to testify that Bryant’s alleged victim “is well known as being promiscuous, as being willing to sleep with men on the first date, and as someone who will actively pursue sexual encounters with men.”
Easter asked Eagle County District Judge Terry Ruckriegle to limit the questions asked of the young woman in a manner that she proposed in a separate filing made Friday that remains under seal.
The sexual history of Bryant’s alleged victim is relevant to the case, his lawyers have argued, due to evidence that they said shows she had had multiple sexual partners in the days before and possibly shortly after, the night she met Bryant.
