I admittedly don't know much of his La Liga career.
But until the stamps, the reputation he had in England was not congruent with his behaviour. All I saw was an aggressive striker winding up defenders that were also giving it large themselves.
Now of course I have less recourse to defend him, since the stamps are not defendable. But before them there were people calling him cunt this, and cunt that, when all he was doing was having tussles with defenders, something you can see week in week out of any average PL team. But average PL teams don't get the screentime, they aren't important to the storyline. Costa is and will get framed nicely for it.
The media can skew things in any direction they want. The fact that Vertonghen's choke a night later than the stamps hardly got a peep proves that so clearly.