Jackson Free Press logo

This story originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press. It was added to the Mississippi Free Press website in 2025.
Note that any opinions expressed in legacy Jackson Free Press stories do not reflect a position of the Mississippi Free Press or necessarily of its staff and board members.

Sports Illustrated’s Roy S. Johnson writes what a lot of people are thinking: Kobe Bryant is new O.J. Does this mean that Bryant is going to spend the rest of his life on golf courses looking for the real culprit?

Previous Comments

The new O.J.? That doesn’t seem quite right to me. I haven’t been following all of it, but it strikes me as a bit of a combination of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson. It is very interesting to me that one of the new uses of the Internet seems to be for the hate-spewers to post rape victims’ names and personal info, being that no one can stop them. And, ironically, the Internet can offer an anonymous forum for people to spew venom and harass. We used to have anonymous phone calls; that’s hard to do now, but the Internet has replaced the phone as the harassment medium. There’s nothing we can do about it, I suppose (I, after all, allow anonymous postings here), but as an Internet audience, we can strive to recognize anonymous phone calls, so to speak, when they come, and afford them about as much respect and credibility. As using the Internet openly to hurt other people (such as the Kobe accuser), perhaps it’s better for the nastiness to come on out of the closet. I hate to think about the people hurt in the process, though. Anyway, just raving on Dr. S’s blog; I’ve only had one cup of coffee, so sorry if it’s incoherent!

Mississippi native Donna Ladd and partner Todd Stauffer founded the Jackson Free Press in 2002 in the capital city. The heavily awarded local newspaper did many investigations heralded across the state and nation and served as a paper of record due to its diversity, inclusion, in-depth reporting and deep connection to readers and dedication to narrative change in and about Mississippi. In 2022, the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press, founded by Ladd and JFP Associate Publisher Kimberly Griffin in 2020, purchased the journalism assets and archives of the Jackson Free Press. A Google grant through AAN Publishers enabled Newspack's integration of the JFP archives into the Mississippi Free Press website to become part of a more searchable archive of recent Mississippi history and essential journalism.