Editor’s Note: A new series “Kobe: The Making of a Legend” traces the story of Kobe Bryant from his childhood in Italy to his athletic superstardom and provides an intimate look at his post-NBA aspirations as a storyteller and as a father. The three-part series resumes Saturday at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

In 2003, Kobe Bryant was on top of the world.

By that time, seven years after he was drafted, he had already established himself as an NBA superstar, winning three championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and earning five All-Star selections.

Bryant was a cultural icon, too, transcending basketball in a way that only a select few players in history have managed.

There was a new mega signature shoe deal with Nike, various endorsements for fast food, drink and sports companies, plus appearances alongside Hollywood celebrities.

“He was the king of LA at that point,” Allison Samuels, journalist and writer for The Daily Beast, said in episode two of CNN Original Films and Series’ documentary, “Kobe: The Making of a Legend.”

After the Lakers had won their third straight NBA title in June 2002, the streets of the City of Angels were filled with fans chanting one player’s name: “Kobe, Kobe, Kobe!”

Bryant would soon become a father, with wife Vanessa – who he married in April 2001 after dating less than a year – giving birth to their first daughter, Natalia, in January 2003.

Given that Bryant was one of the most sought-after man in LA – perhaps even in the whole of the United States at the time – interviews with news publications and TV channels continued to flow.

All the while, Bryant portrayed an image of being the perfect family man – or a “Superhusband,” as he put it in one interview. One interviewer, after telling Bryant she had done reams of research on him, called him “squeaky clean.”

“People really thought: ‘Okay, this is a guy who is going home to his wife and his kid, and everything is okay,’” Samuels said.

However, that image was soon shattered forever.

On July 1, 2003, Bryant was accused of sexual assault after an encounter with a 19-year-old who worked at a resort hotel in Colorado, where the Lakers guard had checked in ahead of undergoing knee surgery.

Bryant turned himself into police on July 4, three days after the accuser filed a complaint to authorities, before he was formally charged by district attorney Mark Hurlbert in the small town of Eagle, Colorado, on July 18..

Bryant always maintained the encounter was consensual.

The trial

The trial and the media scrutiny it drew – the newspaper columns, TV segments and interviews – quickly became a circus. The town of Eagle, a “cute and small” farming and ranching community, was totally “ill-prepared for what was about to happen to them,” Ingrid Bakke, a former prosecutor who worked on the case, said in the documentary.

“The media attention from day one, that was part of the problem,” Bakke added. “It was crazy. That coverage was crazy.”

On July 18, 2003, Bryant held a press conference in Los Angeles alongside wife Vanessa and attorney Pam Mackey in one of his first public appearances since the accusation was made, where he declared, “I’m innocent,” but admitted he was “disgusted” with himself for “making the mistake of adultery.”

In the months leading up to his first court appearance on August 6, the documentary shows an overt trend among members of the media, public, and former and current NBA players voicing their support for Bryant.

“‘She’s just a hotel worker,’” Bakke said in episode two, recounting much of public sentiment to the alleged victim’s claim at the time. “‘Come on, it can’t be true. And even if it is true, she’s just a hotel worker. He’s still Kobe Bryant.’”

Samuels adds that “people loved him even more” after the allegations, which was evident among the crowd at the 2003 Nickelodeon Teen Choice Awards, which took place just two weeks after charges were filed.

In front of an adoring, screaming crowd, Bryant was named Male Athlete of the Year and was once again serenaded with chants of “Kobe, Kobe, Kobe” as he made his way onto the stage.

“That audience, I mean they were in love with him,” Samuels said. “They are like: ‘This is our hero.’ It’s as though nothing has happened.

“The support was crazy,” she added.

The relentless nature of the interrogation of the alleged victim included Mackey naming her six times in open court after the judge had warned her not to do so. Bryant’s attorney later apologized and said she would write herself a note to avoid saying the accuser’s name again.

Mackey declined to be interviewed for the documentary.

Exactly one year after Bryant was arrested, the judge presiding over the case ruled the alleged victim’s sexual history was relevant and would be allowed in trial.

“It is incredibly invasive and it is incredibly traumatizing,” Hurlbert said of the decision, adding the alleged victim and her family had to move around the country several times due to death threats.

“The tactics of Mr. Bryant’s team was to throw everything at her and break her down,” Samuels said.

Eventually, they succeeded.

During jury selection, the alleged victim phoned Hurlbert to say she no longer wanted to proceed with the case and instead focus on a recently filed civil suit against Bryant, which was settled privately in March 2005.

“I know they just lost faith, they just lost faith in the system,” Bakke added.

At the time criminal charges were dropped, Kobe apologized to the woman and said in a statement: “Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did.

“After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”

Birth of the Black Mamba

On December 19, 2003, while the charges were still pending, the Los Angeles Lakers hosted the Denver Nuggets in a game that became known for Bryant turning up late to the arena – and then hitting the game winner.

Bryant arrived at Staples Center when there were around four minutes remaining in the first quarter, flying into LA directly from a court hearing in Eagle.

He scored just 13 points, but the final two proved the most crucial of the entire game, sinking a 21-foot buzzer-beater to give the Lakers a 101-99 victory over Denver.

“That takes a strong will,” Tracy McGrady, a seven-time All-Star and friend of Bryant, told CNN Sport recently. “A strong-minded and confident individual that has really channeled all of his focus and energy into a space that nothing can penetrate and get him out of that.

“That was Kobe: he could take his mind somewhere he wants to go and, in the midst of that, nothing can penetrate through to distract him from what he’s trying to achieve.

“That is a unique ability that takes hours and lots of meditative exercises – and he mastered that.”

However, Mike Sielski, author of a biography on Bryant called The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality, said the announcers were “soft-peddling the nature of what kept him away from the basketball court,” a continuation of the public support he received during the case.

“They’re framing it in a way that makes it seem as if this is another piece of adversity for him to overcome, instead of a situation in which he is alleged to have done a terrible thing,” Sielski said in the documentary. “A reprehensible thing.”

“That’s a really tricky dance.”

Ahead of the 2003-04 season, Bryant reached out to performance coach and author of The Alter Ego Effect, Todd Herman, with more than 100 Olympic and professional clients.

Herman told CNN Sport that Bryant wanted help with his mental game going into the season, as the court case continued.

“Basically, his main issue was: ‘Hey, I feel like I’m losing my edge.’

“Those were his words. I said: ‘You’re not losing your edge, you’re going through an ego death.’

“It really resonated with him immediately, that someone else put a name to it that he hadn’t really heard about.”

Ever since coming into the league, Bryant had been adored by legions of fans. But while he continued to enjoy public support during the trial, Herman said Bryant knew that some fans would have turned on him.

“He wasn’t someone who really battled the crowd before … but he kept on rolling tape over in his head that the upcoming season was going to be a visceral auditory attack on him, calling him names,” Herman said.

“That version of you, that identity that worked for you before, it’s not going to work in this new world.”

Herman said coming up with a new alter ego requires a mix of science and art. “It’s a very creative process,” he added.

Given Bryant’s main concern appeared to be auditory, Herman began thinking of alter egos – either machine or animal – that had nothing to do with hearing.

Herman said Bryant liked the idea of what he describes as closed-loop animals – which, unlike what he calls open-loop animals such as humans and dogs, do not share “emotional energy” back and forth – and eventually settled on a snake.

It wasn’t until some months later, around April 2004, that Herman said Bryant came up with the idea of the Black Mamba, a venomous African snake, also the codename for Uma Thurman’s assassin character in the Kill Bill movies.

When the alter ego clicked, Herman recalled Bryant getting “very, very excited.”

“To his credit, I’ll say, a couple of years in, there’s probably nobody on the planet who knew more about black mamba snakes than Kobe.”

Bryant enjoyed many of his best moments on the court after adopting his Black Mamba alter ego.

There was his 62-point game against the Mavericks in December 2005 in which he outscored the entire Dallas team through three quarters, before he registered a career-high 81 points the next month against the Toronto Raptors.

Perhaps no player experienced the Black Mamba up close quite like Jalen Rose.

On January 22, 2006, while playing for the Raptors, Rose was given the unenviable task of guarding Bryant.

Bryant scored his career-high that day – the second most in NBA history behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 – with Rose being his primary defender for most of the game.

“The ‘Mamba Mentality’ is a real thing,” Rose told CNN Sport. “What that embodies and what that means to me is: keep the main thing the main thing. He was always disciplined, he was always focused.”

Bryant then won his first and only MVP award in 2008, which was followed by a first NBA title without Shaquille O’Neal as a teammate in 2009, and then a second in 2010.

“Post-Mamba Kobe has a lot to do with him learning how to use hate to become his power,” Jackson says. “There’s a lot of stuff that happened to this guy. Once he embraced hate, the Mamba just showed up.”

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