Report: Kobe Bryant Created Black Mamba Persona to Cope With Rape Charge Fallout

A new profile of Kobe Bryant in The Washington Post makes the case that, like a snake, Kobe Bryant chose to shed his skin following allegations he raped a woman in a Colorado hotel room in 2003.

Though charges against him were eventually dropped after the accuser refused to testify, Bryant did settle a civil suit with her and the negative publicity led to companies he endorsed like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola dropping the NBA star like a hot potato.

To help steel himself mentally and move beyond the beating his image had taken, Bryant decided to embrace an alternate persona he’d lifted from a Kill Bill character with a non-speaking role: the black mamba.

“The length, the snake, the bite, the strike, the temperament,” Bryant says of the moment he saw Daryl Hannah’s character introduce the deadly snake.“‘Let me look this sh*t up.’ I looked it up — yeah, that’s me. That’s me!’”

By becoming the cold and deadly Black Mamba on the court, Bryant was also able to insulate himself off of it.

“During the Colorado situation, I said: ‘You know what? I’m just going to be me. I’m just going to be me.’ F*ck it. If I don’t like a question from a reporter, I’m going to say it,” he says. “If they ask me a question about this thing, I’m just going to tell them the truth. Like me or don’t like me for me.”

The lone company that stood by him through the Colorado mess, Nike, embraced the nickname as well and introduced a snake-inspired logo and Mamba signature sneaker.

Had he not come up with the mamba persona, things could have turned out much differently for the perennial NBA All-Star.

“I don’t know what would’ve happened had I not figured it out,” Bryant says. “Because the whole process for me was trying to figure out how to cope with this. I wasn’t going to be passive and let this thing just swallow me up. You’ve got a responsibility: family, baby, organization, whole city, yourself — how do you figure out how to overcome this? Or just deal with it and not drown from this thing? And so it was this constant quest: to figure out how do you do that, how do you do that, how do you do that? So I was bound to figure something out because I was so obsessively concerned about it.”