Roll Red Roll was a case that we studied way back in the beginning of school. It was the case where some of the players on the high school football team had a party and legibly rapped and assaulted a Jane Doe. Trent and Malik were the 2 main boys that were involved with this case. there were videos, text messages, and phone calls between many of the boys constantly bringing up those 2 mans saying they were going to rape that girl and making jokes about the whole thing. No one stood up to them are did anything to try and stop them from what they were doing, they all just let it happen.
Remember they went to three parties that night. At the first party that is when they met the girl and they were all having a great time drinking and dancing. Then they left and went to another football players house and the Jane Doe left with Trent and Malik and 2 others, leaving behind her friends. Not much is known about the second house, but they eventually leave that one and the girl was still fine. Somewhere in between leaving the 2nd house and arriving at the 3rd house the girl is not okay anymore and there are suspicions that the girls drink was drugged or spiked to make her unconscious. and then the drunk boys who stayed downstairs started taking videos about what they thought was happening upstairs, but we may never know what actually happened.
The only reason that this case got looked into was because the Jane Doe actually stood up for herself and went to the authorities and tried to talk to someone about her situation and her alleged rape that occurred. The police tried to keep this within the community, but when a local crime blogger caught wind of this story she thought it was a way bigger deal than the town was portraying it to be, so she decided to make a blog and it blew up nationwide. News channels, radio stations, everything media related caught wind of this and there was no more hiding what was going on in that town. It was a crazy thing for people to see and hear. Then the Hacker group known as Anonymous found some videos of the boys joking around that same night and released them to the public for the world to see. that is where things started to get out of control. There were protests and rallies going on, yet it was people coming into Steubenville that were apart of the rallies. The male residents of Steubenville wanted nothing to do with all the publicity they were getting.
The two boys were tried and found guilty, but each only received 1 year in juvenile prison, which is crazy because it should have been more for what they did.
I honestly think the Anonymous posts of videos were essential in this case to raise awareness for Jane Doe. Steubenville wanted so shelter this case and keep Big Red High School's reputation positive. Without these videos exposing the boys and the football team, this case would not have been focused on nation-wide. Although i agree this is where things got out of control, without the rallies and protests, Jane Doe may not have had the support she needed after this horrible incident.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the anonymous tapes were essential for raising awareness and getting justice for Jane Doe. I think the fact that Trent and Malik had planned to rape Jane Doe from the very first party and got her drunk on purpose in order to make her unconscious reflects really terribly on them and shows that this wasn’t something that accidentally happened. Trent took advantage of how much Jane Doe liked him, and used it to commit a very terrible crime against her.
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