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Comrade Grumpy

(13,184 posts) Sat Aug 3, 2013, 02:54 PM Aug 2013

The New Yorker on Steubenville: "Trial By Twitter," "Was Justice Served"

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/05/130805fa_fact_levy

A long, interesting read on the Steubenville rape case and the role of social media in reporting (and distorting) events.

It starts like this:

TRIAL BY TWITTER

After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served. Was it?

BY ARIEL LEVY
AUGUST 5, 2013

One Saturday last August, a sixteen year-old girl in West Virginia did something that teen-agers do: she told her parents that she was sleeping at another girl’s house, across the Ohio River, and then, after her mother dropped her off there, she and a few friends headed into the hot summer night to a party. She brought a bottle of vodka with her, and she used it to spike a slushy that she bought at a gas station on the way to their destination, in a town called Steubenville.

At the party, she met up with a sixteen-year-old named Trent Mays, a good-looking, dark-haired football player with whom she’d been flirting by text and tweet. She’d been “talking to him,” a porous term that teen-agers use to refer to a romantic relationship that is unlikely to be exclusive, and can involve spending time together or just courting through social media. A friend of Mays’s named Anthony Craig had also been talking to the girl that summer. Months later, a prosecutor asked Craig if he had been dating her, and he replied that some people “may look at it as that.” He meant people on the outside of adolescent culture, who have to translate contemporary categories into old-fashioned ones that they can understand.

Like most teen-agers, the girl was very active online: she had profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Prezi, which explained that her favorite color was pink, her favorite movie was “Mean Girls,” and her favorite stores were Hollister, Juicy Couture, and Victoria’s Secret. “I like anything sparkly,” she posted. Trent Mays, a good student with a buzz cut and a belligerent sense of humor, also used Twitter to express his enthusiasms: “There is just something bout girls in jean shorts.”

About fifty teen-agers were at the party, and no adults. There were lots of football players and wrestlers from Steubenville High School—Big Red, people call it—and there was lots of liquor and beer. Many of the kids were drinking, but the girl from West Virginia was unusually intoxicated, and people talked about it. At around midnight, the hostess’s older brother came in and, according to a senior named Mark Cole, determined that “the party was getting out of hand and said everyone had to leave.” Cole decided to drive to another party, nearby, and he was joined by two mainstays of the football team: Mays, the quarterback, and Ma’lik Richmond, a big, soft-spoken sophomore who was the star wide receiver and an honor-roll student. The girl from West Virginia wanted to go, too, and was “very loud” about it, Cole said. “Her friends tried to get her to stay with them, but she screamed and denied and said that she wanted to come with us.” One of her friends later told the police that she tried to stop her, “because she’s done this before; I was, like, She’s not doing this again.” But the girl was so set on getting in the car that she became physically combative: “She wanted to go with Trent.”

At the next party, she threw up in the bathroom. “She was very drunk,” Cole recalled, “like she wasn’t fully capable of walking on her own.” It was a smaller gathering, of about a dozen teens, and, not long after the group arrived, the host’s mother came downstairs and said that anyone who wasn’t sleeping over had to go home. Anthony Craig said later that he remembered Mays and Ma’lik Richmond carrying the girl from West Virginia outside.

<snip>

Much more at the link, including a whole bunch about the role of Alexandria Goddard, the blogger who really blew this up.