Kobe Bryant’s daughter, Natalia, files restraining order against alleged stalker
The daughter of the late Kobe Bryant has filed a restraining order against a 32-year-old Sun Valley man, claiming he has been stalking her since she was a minor, according to court filings.
Natalia Bryant, 19, alleges that Dwayne Kemp started to harass her on social media in 2020, when she was 17 and a senior at Sage Hill School in Newport Coast. Kemp is described as a gun enthusiast in Bryant’s filing for a temporary restraining order in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Bryant’s attorney included screenshots from Kemp’s social media account, including an image of Kemp purchasing a rifle a few days after he tried to find Bryant this month at USC, where she’s a sophomore student, according to the filing.
While Bryant said she has never met Kemp, he started to message her on Instagram when he was 30 and spoke to her as though they were in a relationship. He sent her kissing face emojis and hearts and threatened to meet her at her sorority house and at the USC campus.
Bryant claims Kemp’s actions escalated, and she’s terrified he’s trying to find her.
“I do not feel safe,” Bryant said in her filing.
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Bryant’s attorney believes Kemp has attempted to contact her for several years to declare his unrequited love. Several examples of his Instagram messages were included in the filing.
In February 2021, Kemp wrote to Bryant, “Im Coming To Visit Soon.”
In other messages, he asked to reconcile as though the two were once romantically involved and had a falling out. He told her that he wanted to have a child with her who could just be like her father, according to the filing.
Former Lakers star Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, died along with seven others when their helicopter slammed into a hillside above Calabasas on Jan. 26, 2020.
As recently as Nov. 2, Kemp traveled from Sun Valley to the USC campus in an attempt to find Natalia Bryant and meet her in person, according to a USC campus police report attached to the filing. Kemp brought a bouquet of marigold flowers to the campus and asked for Bryant at a dean’s office. He asked for her by name, and when the staff told him she was not there, Kemp said that he already went to her home, but she wasn’t there, according to the report.
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Kemp then wandered the hallways at the school with the bouquet, according to a still image from a security camera at the school that is included in the court filing. Kemp claimed he wanted to give Bryant the flowers because he understood it was an important day in her family. Nov. 2 was Día de Muertos.
“It appears that the subject was possibly referring to the Natalia’s deceased father, Kobe Bryant, and referring to Natalia’s Mother, Vanessa Bryant’s partial Hispanic heritage,” according to a campus police report.
While Kemp did not identify himself by name, campus police included screenshots from his Instagram account. Those included a photo of him carrying the bouquet of flowers on a Metro train that same day and a photo of himself. There were also numerous photos of Bryant on Kemp’s social media feed.
A security guard told campus police that an unidentified man tried to find Bryant off campus and had left flowers at her sorority house, according to the filing.
A few days after Kemp visited USC, he posted images on social media of a pistol-style AK-47 gun with the word “next,” which implied he was going to buy these firearms. He also posted that he wanted to buy a “Glock switch,” an illegal device that allows a semiautomatic Glock pistol to function as a fully automatic firearm, according to the court filing.
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Kemp posted three videos of himself in a gun store purchasing a rifle on Nov. 9. He pointed the rifle at the camera, asked a salesclerk if he could take the stalk off the rifle and asked if the rifle came with a switch to make it fully automatic, the filing said.
On Nov. 16, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management Unit sent a letter to Kemp, notifying him that his actions were unwanted and could potentially be illegal, according to a copy of the letter attached to the filing.
Kemp has been arrested at least four times for misdemeanors, including one incident that involved a gun, and Bryant’s attorneys claim there are multiple warrants out for Kemp’s arrest. Kemp has at least one registered firearm that is now in police custody, the filing said.
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