Look, no one likes to see their heroes fall. It's traumatic, in a very Freudian sense. I get it.
I've lost my two all-time sports heroes over the last few years. Both to the dreaded conspiracy theories idiocy.
Of course, I could've as well just dropped the "sports" from the above statements. When you're a kid, sporting heroes are heroes, period. You grow up, but you hope that you can grow old with your heroes, in a sense. You wanna believe they're not just great athletes, but also great human beings. It sucks when you discover they're not just flawed humans like everyone else, but actually complete idiots or even just horrible human beings. It feels like an important part of your own identity is under question or even under attack.
As a society, though, we have strive to do better. Of course there's laws and of course I'm not suggesting we apply any of them retroactively, but there's more to ethics than laws. People should be held to a much, much higher ethical standard than "guilty/innocent." Again, it can be hard sometimes. I'm probably not going to throw my Stockton jersey out, but I haven't worn it recently. It sucks because my other Jazz jersey is a Mitchell one. I don't wanna wear either. What's a Jazz fan to do?
We just can't conflate athletic accomplishments with being a good citizen. That's fine. Kobe's still an all-time great, just like OJ is at football. It shouldn't have bearing on how we judge them as human beings.
It shouldn't matter if you've done this:
or this: