Which guaranteed that he could avoid prison and move forward with his life.

"we" aren't supposed to do anything with that. It just is.

That statement wasn't for us.
It wasn't even for the alleged victim, not in any real sense.
It was a hoop to jump through.

It was a requirement to settle. It doesn't read like anything any person actually says. It's PR boilerplate.

Absent a full trial, we can all armchair attorney this shit and arrive at different conclusions.

Just as people choose to read into the apology as an admission of guilt on his part, we can just as easily read into it as an admission of his innocence on her part.

After all, if he really was a rapist, and she really was his victim, why not put him in prison?

Likewise, the justification for her to demand this as part of a settlement, if Kobe truly was guilty, is no different from Kobe's justification for agreeing to make the statement:

So she can just move on with her life, and avoid a nasty trial that she could ultimately lose, while being dragged to hell and back along the way.

Problem is, we have to fill in too many gaps in the narrative to arrive at any conclusion about the apology other than the bare bones obvious:

That the apology doesn't really point to anything other than meeting a requirement in a settlement.