"I'm A Grown-Up Now": The Teen Who Accused Kevin Johnson Of Sexual Abuse Speaks Out
There is a photograph of a pile of pink and white paper hearts atop Mandi Koba’s Facebook page. She cut the hearts out of hard copies of a 1996 police report from Phoenix, Ariz. The cops, according to the vintage report used in the arts and crafts project, were investigating “a celebrity involved in a reported child molestation.”
Kevin Johnson was the celebrity. These days he’s a politician, a national figure with aspirations to the governorship of California who’s proclaimed himself “Little Barack” and worked closely with the Obama administration. Married to Michelle Rhee, face of the charter-school movement, he’s positioned himself throughout his adult life as a sort of catcher in the rye for at-risk inner-city children through his work with a variety of charter schools and foundations, setting him up for his current run as the scandal-prone mayor of Sacramento, Calif. In 1996, though, he was one of the NBA’s top stars, at the very height of a career with the Phoenix Suns that saw him make three All-Star teams and earn tens of millions of dollars.
Mandi Koba, 15 years old at the beginning of the events described in the report, was the child.
In time, there would be a fair amount of public discussion of the allegations made in that report, which involved Johnson fondling the teenager, showering with her, rubbing his genitals against her bare thigh, suggesting they pray together and ask for forgiveness, and making the only child from a single-parent home give a “pinky promise” that she wouldn’t tell her friends or mother what he’d done. But the investigation produced no physical evidence that any crime had been committed, no criminal charges were ever filed against Johnson, and the accuser never spoke out.
A year after prosecutors decided not to indict, word about Koba’s molestation allegations got out around Phoenix. In May 1997, the Phoenix New Times reported that a lawyer representing the girl was trying to get money out of Johnson. Koba was not named—the pseudonym “Kim Adams” was used—but she took a beating in the story. Attorney Fred Hiestand, an advisor to Johnson at the time and to this day, told the paper "I'm A Grown-Up Now": The Teen Who Accused Kevin Johnson Of Sexual Abuse Speaks Out:
