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Tara Vilhauer, a young Portland, Ore., hotel employee, says she struck up a friendly rapport with returning guest Kobe Bryant over the last few years, but she says their pleasant hotel room chats stopped when things got a little too close for comfort.
Vilhauer said the basketball star, who is now facing sexual assault charges, asked her to come to his room to remove his food tray when he was a guest there in October 2002. The 24-year-old room service attendant says she and Byrant talked about his family before he leaned in and kissed her.
"I engaged in the kiss and I then I had about a million and a half things go through my mind," Vilhauer said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "I said 'this can't happen.' I said 'I have a boyfriend. You have a wife. This is not going to happen.' He [Bryant] said 'that's cool,' and I left after that."
Kiss Story Gets Out
Vilhauer, 24, says she put the Bryant incident behind her until prosecutors from the Eagle County Colorado District Attorney's Office somehow found out about her story after a 19-year-old hotel employee from Eagle, Colo., accused Bryant of rape in June 2003.
Vilhauer says prosecutors in the Bryant case showed up at the posh Portland hotel where she works late last year, wanting to hear her story. When she refused to provide them with details, Vilhauer says the prosecutors didn't leave her alone.
Vilhauer said they stayed in the hotel overnight and happened to get on the same elevator with her the next morning.
"They said 'we really want to talk you. We want to maybe get together with you after work,'" Vilhauer said.
The young room service attendant said she told them she had nothing to say.
"What happened between him [Bryant] and I, happened between him and I," she said.
When Good Morning America contacted the Eagle County Colorado District Attorney's Office with Vilhauer's claims, the office offered the following statement. "We tried to speak with Tara Vilhauer twice. She refused us, and we left. No information was exchanged."
Vilhauer says she felt as if the prosecutors interpreted the alleged kiss as something different to what it actually was.
Source: ABCNEWS.com
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