He left a bruise on her neck and drew blood from her skin. But it is also reductive to focus only on this behavior when reflecting on his life and death. I thought about the many black children and families who saw Bryant as a possibility model. And I thought about the woman who accused Bryant of rape having to watch her perpetrator being valorized for eternity. The MeToo movement has helped equip us with more nuanced understanding of sexual violence. A person can be good to their spouses and their children, donate lots of money and create indelible work that influences—and can also be a monster. Thanks to the pressures of social media, in which we react to unfathomable news in real time, we often fall into a binary of good or bad, wrong or right, on the side of survivors or on the side of a rapist.

When Shirley Alvarado del Aguila got to work on Jan. She works for an organization that serves rape and domestic violence survivors, and she was angry that people who brought the subject up were being attacked online. So she deactivated her social media accounts. She also worried about the woman who said Bryant had assaulted her nearly 17 years earlier — what she was thinking, how she was holding up.

But it took only a second for some to realize that many accounts ignored one part of his story: the rape case. People tweeted old articles about how a year-old accused the star basketball player of rape at a Colorado hotel, and they criticized those who ignored it. Others made death threats against people who brought up the case, insisting it was simply too soon, or brushed it aside because the lengthy case against Bryant ultimately collapsed after the alleged victim withdrew.