AGLE, Colo., March 25 — The mother of the 19-year-old woman who has accused the basketball star Kobe Bryant of sexual assault appealed to the judge in the case on Thursday, beseeching the court to do what she believed Colorado's rape victim laws had so far failed to do: protect her daughter.

"I would like to share with you the reality of my daughter's life," the woman wrote in a letter asking Chief Judge W. Terry Ruckriegle of District Court to assure her daughter's safety by setting a trial date soon. "She has received literally hundreds of death threats on the phone, in the mail and e-mail. In addition, she has received thousands of obscene messages. We are constantly worried about her safety."

Despite laws that are intended to shield sex-crime victims from the withering scrutiny once common in rape cases, and the prohibitions against publishing their names or photographs, the woman in the Bryant case has become widely known, her anonymity obliterated partly by the celebrity culture that surrounds Mr. Bryant.

She has also faced extensive public skepticism, at least in part a result of the defense's insistence that she be questioned about her sexual encounters to support its contention that the incident involved only consensual sex. That questioning was conducted at a closed hearing this week.

"My daughter has lived in four states in the past 6 months," her mother wrote in her letter.

"She is followed everywhere by the defense and the media," added the mother, whose name, along with her daughter's, was blacked out. "She can't live at home, she can't live with relatives, she can't go to school or talk to her friends."

The mother wrote that recently at a restaurant in Eagle, a man began taking pictures and questioning her daughter and two friends. They asked him to stop and tried to walk away, the mother said, but he would not stop until her daughter called for help on her cellphone.

The letter was included as an attachment to a motion filed by John C. Clune, a lawyer for the young woman, who said that his client, under a crime victims' law passed in Colorado in the early 1990's, had the right to a "speedy disposition of the case."

"As each month passes, more dates are scheduled for motions and more death threats are sent to a nineteen-year-old girl who has been forced to leave everyone who has the ability to protect her," Mr. Clune wrote.

Mr. Bryant has not disputed that he and the woman had sex at a resort hotel near Vail on June 30. Both parties say she went to his room and they kissed. Mr. Bryant says the sex that ensued was consensual; she told the police he became violent, pushed her over a chair and raped her.

Legal experts said that Mr. Clune's motion underlined just how much the woman had become the center of the case — equal in celebrity, perhaps, even to Mr. Bryant, though he is famous, and she is supposedly cloaked in legal shadow.

"We thought we'd fixed the system," said Wendy J. Murphy, a former sex-crimes prosecutor, referring to the criminal reforms of the 1970's, including rape-victim protection laws adopted across the nation that were inspired by the women's movement. "This case is presenting crystal-clear evidence that those reforms failed."

Ms. Murphy, who teaches perspectives in sexual violence at the New England School of Law, said she thought that women were still victimized twice in sex-crime cases. Society's views about women who say they were raped, she contended, have not really changed that much over the years and victims still do not have much standing in the criminal justice system.

The rape shield law in Colorado is at the heart of this week's two-day hearing, in which the judge is deciding whether to allow information about the woman's sex history into evidence at a later trial.

The woman spent four hours testifying in a closed hearing on Wednesday about those matters, as Mr. Bryant's lawyers argued that the details were so crucial to the defense that they overrode the protections afforded rape victims under the shield law.

Prosecutors sought to limit that questioning, arguing that her sexual past, under Colorado's rape victim protection law, was irrelevant. But the defense argued that other sexual partners either before or after Mr. Bryant could have caused or aggravated the injuries she had.

The testimony, however traumatic it may have been for the woman, was not mentioned in her lawyer's filing on Thursday, or in the letter from her mother as a contributing cause of her anguish. The question posed by the closed hearing is how much, if any, of her sexual history a jury will learn, but Judge Ruckriegle has not said when he will issue his ruling.

Thursday's motion also creates a new balancing act for Judge Ruckriegle in weighing Mr. Bryant's rights to a full preparation of his defense, which included scientific testing of the evidence gathered by the police, and his accuser's claim that things are taking too long. One lawyer who has closely followed the case said that few crime victims assert their right to speedy process, and thus few appeals courts have determined how a judge should rule concerning the possible conflicting demands of defendant and accuser.

"There's a dearth of case law interpreting it so we've always wondered whether these are nice words or whether they have some meaning," said Craig Silverman, a former prosecutor in Denver who is now in private practice.

Who is responsible for the prolonged process is another question. Mr. Bryant's lawyers said earlier this month in court that prosecutors had not turned over all the evidence to which the judge had said they were entitled. Judge Ruckriegle, obviously annoyed, ordered that prosecutors release the remaining items.

A spokeswoman for the Eagle County District Attorney's office declined to comment, saying that if her office had a response to Mr. Clune's motion, it would be made in a filing with the court. All the lawyers have been forbidden by the judge to speak to reporters about the case.