Bryant's Attorney Plays Foul At Court

By Rita Healy

Eagle County Detective Doug Winters testified at a preliminary hearing last week that the encounter between an unnamed 19-year-old hotel worker and Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, who is charged with raping her, started out innocently enough: a chat in the basketball star's room and some consensual kissing. It was only as the alleged victim prepared to leave, the detective said, that Bryant's behavior turned ugly.

Now, it appears, so has Bryant's defense strategy. His attorney Pamela Mackey named the alleged victim several times at the hearing, apologizing each time for "forgetting" to keep the woman's identity confidential, as required by the court. Then she suggested that the alleged victim's vaginal lacerations were perhaps a result of her having had sex with three men in three days.

But there may be a method to Mackey's hardball tactics: Mackey didn't explicitly say the victim slept with three men on three consecutive days. She merely implied that the defense has found two men willing to say they had sex with the accuser on two days other than the one on which she encountered Bryant. And, according to legal experts, Mackey can now drop the suggestion entirely. She is not legally bound to provide proof of the implication or to repeat it if the case moves to trial. In a county of 42,000 people, many of whom are acquainted with the alleged victim or her family, the insinuation alone could taint any prospective jury, requiring that the trial be moved elsewhere.

--By Rita Healy