My dad says it often: Life is messy.
Messy and complicated.
That's how I've long regarded the Lawrence Phillips story, right until the end.
Phillips himself was complicated. He was a thinker. A voracious reader. He didn't trust the media. That in itself indicates intelligence.
"The news is laughable," Phillips once wrote in a letter from prison to Paul Koch, a former Nebraska strength and conditioning coach.
"There's no objectivity," Phillips continued, "so I tend to stay away from it."
Phillips enjoyed reading books on philosophy. He recently was immersed in Friedrich Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil.