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Washington
Post
Steubenville,
the media and ‘rape, essentially’
Posted by Melinda Henneberger
March 18, 2013
Without social media — and irrefutable video evidence helpfully
provided by the proud young perps themselves — it’s fair to wonder
whether the two Steubenville high school football players found guilty
Sunday of raping an unconscious 16-year-old would ever have even been
charged.
Twitter and YouTube were weapons turned against the victim when a
12-minute party video of her — showing her passed out and naked, being
violated and urinated on — was widely shared and, judging from the
response it got, widely enjoyed: “Song of the night is Rape Me by
Nirvana,” tweeted a recent grad of the school, now enrolled at Ohio
State. Another football player at the high school tweeted, “Were not
gonna let dumb s___ like this mess up our championship goal.”
At first, anyway, that didn’t seem to be a minority view in the town of
18,000, where the team has 27 football coaches and has won nine state
football championships. In fact, without the evidence shared by the
accused and others who saw what happened and never tried to stop it,
it’s not at all clear that police would have been able to make a case
against even the two players, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, who cried
when the verdict was announced. If aspiring assailants keep this up,
one of my least favorite phrases, “He said, she said,” may no longer be
an out for those who prefer not to know.
One stubborn, sometimes over-the-top blogger, Alex Goddard, kept the
heat on until the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote about the case in
September. For her trouble, she was sued for defamation by a high
school junior and his parents, a suit that has since been dismissed by
a judge.
Without the national attention that followed, would the state of Ohio
have taken over the case? Would Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine,
have put out a statement that the investigation was ongoing, and that
charges might still be filed against anyone who failed to speak up?
“I’ve reached the conclusion that this investigation cannot be
completed, simply cannot be completed, that we cannot bring finality to
this matter without the convening of a grand jury,” he said, adding
that sexual assaults actually happen every Friday night and every
Saturday night across the country. Strikingly, he didn’t mean that as
any defense of what happened in Steubenville, either…
You may want to gag, but reading the rest of this article is a “must”
at the Washington Post
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