I. INTRODUCTION Criminal sexual assault charges against professional basketball player Kobe Bryant were dropped on September 1, 2004. (1) One reason why the charges were dropped was that his accuser refused to testify about the incident in criminal court. (2) Without her testimony, there was not enough evidence against Bryant for the case to go forward to trial. (3) However, the accuser continued to pursue a civil lawsuit against Bryant seeking damages for physical and emotional pain and suffering resulting from the incident. (4) The purpose of the current research is to examine the impact of Bryant's public statement on perceptions of his civil case. Two studies were conducted between the time that he issued the public statement on September 1, 2004 and the date that a settlement was announced in the civil case on March 2, 2005. The research focuses on two aspects of Bryant's statement: the impact of the statement being in the form of an apology and the influence of a sentence in the statement informing the public that the statement would not be used against Bryant in the civil case.
