Kobe Bryant's Colorado prosecutor recalls the case that linked them
IN EARLY JULY 2003, Hurlbert's phone rang. It was a sheriff's deputy. Hurlbert was 34 and just six months into his job as DA, an appointee of then-Gov. Bill Owens. He had sandy blond hair parted to the right and intense blue eyes. Like Bryant, Hurlbert was a young father; he had a 3-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter. He had grown up in Dillon, Colorado, and graduated from Dartmouth and the University of Colorado Law School. He wanted to work for the government, standing up for the little guy.
The deputy had tough news. "Mark, we have allegations of sexual assault against Kobe Bryant," he said.
"Who?" Hurlbert replied.
Hurlbert knew who, of course, but he was hoping that, somehow, it wasn't that Kobe Bryant.
"The basketball player," the sheriff replied.
A 19-year-old woman had told authorities that on June 30, Bryant raped her in his room at The Lodge and Spa at Cordillera, where she worked at the front desk. On July 18, 2003, after two weeks of reviewing the case, gathering information and seeking advice from other prosecutors, Hurlbert stood at a curved lectern and announced on national television that Kobe Bean Bryant, then 24, would be charged with felony sexual assault, carrying a penalty that ranged from four years to life in prison. Bryant called a news conference the same day, confessing to adultery but emphatically denying the charges. Still, Hurlbert felt confident in his case. He had successfully gone up against rich defendants before, and he had successfully prosecuted sexual assault cases, even with scant physical evidence. "I feel that after reviewing evidence, I can prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt," he said at the lectern.
After the news conference, Hurlbert's mother called. "You did a good job," she said. "But boy, your hair is really receding."
He says his hairline receded more over the next 14 "crazy" months. Bryant was an international icon, a three-time NBA champion whose closest brush with controversy had been rooted in his own ambition, when he tried to wrestle the Los Angeles Lakers away from Shaquille O'Neal. Hurlbert's 35-person staff and $2.3 million budget wasn't prepared for the onslaught of attention. He received death threats. The 19-year-old woman received death threats. Worried that someone might try to steal and sell evidence, Hurlbert had the case file locked in a cabinet. Eventually, bulletproof glass was installed around the DA's office. Hurlbert estimates that at one point, around 3,000 people associated with the media were in Eagle, Colorado, roughly doubling the town's population at the time.
Then-Eagle County District Attorney Mark Hurlbert announced he was dropping all charges against Bryant on Sept. 1, 2004. He had decided he could not win the prosecution without testimony from Bryant's 19-year-old accuser. Stephen Chernin/Getty Images
Hurlbert says he felt a duty to speak to the media on the woman's behalf, so at the beginning, he was all over the airwaves, on ESPN and other national networks. But he quickly realized that he was overmatched. Bryant "had all these PR people," Hurlbert says. "We didn't have a PR team. It was me. It was overwhelming."
The frenzy overwhelmed his case too. Reporters would do their own investigations and "mess things up," Hurlbert says, by both interviewing potential witnesses and scaring off others. Most media didn't print the woman's name, but the Eagle County court, which Hurlbert did not oversee and was in a different part of county government, mistakenly released her identity to the media three times, and a sealed transcript of a closed hearing on DNA evidence was emailed to media outlets. Hurlbert believed that "it truly was an accident" by the court, but the damage was done. The woman's identity became the worst-kept secret around town. Pamela Mackey, Bryant's attorney, had disclosed the woman's name six times in a preliminary hearing and had cited her sexual history. "It was the start of a nightmare for this woman," says Mark Shaw, a lawyer and reporter who covered the case for ESPN. "It was the accuse-the-accuser defense. From that point on, she didn't have a chance. She was looked at as this person who was putting this poor celebrity through all of this anguish."
Some legal experts believed that the prosecution and court were overmatched by the magnitude of the case and by Bryant's resources. But Hurlbert tried his best to remember that, at its core, it was a routine sexual assault case, the kind he had prosecuted before. He assigned two prosecutors to it. "We felt we had a handle on it," he says.
But in late August 2004, just days before the trial was to begin, the woman, who declined to comment Wednesday through her attorney, informed Hurlbert that she didn't want to testify. He understood. He asked her to think about it for a few days. During that time, he called other prosecutors for their advice on what was left of a rape case if the accuser refused to testify. The consensus: The case was over. Hurlbert technically could subpoena her, but he felt that would be amoral. He called her, but her mind was made up. He respected her decision.
On Sept. 1, 2004, he dropped the case. Bryant released a statement, apologizing to the woman and her family while admitting no guilt. The two sides reached a confidential civil settlement in March 2005. "I was disappointed that we had to dismiss the case," Hurlbert says now. "I wish it had gone to a 12-person jury.
"But the victim was going through hell."
Kobe Bryant's Colorado prosecutor recalls the case that linked them
