If you haven’t heard the story yet…it’s a story that scares me for the present/future of young women everywhere and that should be shared from all parts of the internet and news outlets. It’s sadly predictable. It’s what movies are made of. But in those movies, it’s clear who’s in the wrong and how justice should be served.
But then we come back to planet Earth and away from Hollywood and somehow most people struggle with what a victim is. Drunk girls can be victims too.
The scoop: 16yo gets drunk around star football players. They decide to use/urinate/rape her in front of others (it was funny to them). They take videos/pictures of the assault. Other people tweet it, FB it, etc. No one helps or calls cops. Case gets tossed under SHE’S NOT A VICTIM VILLE, SHE WAS SEXUALLY ACTIVE. SHE WANTED THIS.(See New York Timesarticle)
That was until a blogger wouldn’t drop it, since there were pictures/videos/screenshots or as we would otherwise know it in non-bizzaro world SLAM DUNK CASE against the perpetrators. But these are star football players in a football town. So instead blogger gets defamation suits against her.
But Anonymous was on the case and so they leaked a video that has not only, apparently, put the case back on display but now on the national level. And so start the Occupy rallies at Steubenville.
“Afterward, they headed to the home of one football player who has now become a witness for the prosecution. That player told the police that he was in the back seat of his Volkswagen Jetta with Mays and the girl when Mays proceeded to flash the girl’s breasts and penetrate her with his fingers, while the player videotaped it on his phone. The player, who shared the video with at least one person, testified that he videotaped Mays and the girl “because he was being stupid, not making the right choices.” He said he later deleted the recording.
The girl “was just sitting there, not really doing anything,” the player testified. “She was kind of talking, but I couldn’t make out the words that she was saying.”
At that third party, the girl could not walk on her own and vomited several times before toppling onto her side, several witnesses testified. Mays then tried to coerce the girl into giving him oral sex, but the girl was unresponsive, according to the player who videotaped Mays and the girl.
The player said he did not try to stop it because “at the time, no one really saw it as being forceful.”
At one point, the girl was on the ground, naked, unmoving and silent, according to two witnesses who testified. Mays, they said, had exposed himself while he was right next to her.
Richmond was behind her, with his hands between her legs, penetrating her with his fingers, a witness said.
“I tried to tell Trent to stop it,” another athlete, who was Mays’s best friend, testified. “You know, I told him, ‘Just wait — wait till she wakes up if you’re going to do any of this stuff. Don’t do anything you’re going to regret.’ ”
He said Mays answered: “It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
That boy took a photograph of what Mays and Richmond were doing to the girl. He explained in court how he wanted her to know what had happened to her, but he deleted it from his phone, he testified, after showing it to several people.”
From the NY Times article
At a hearing in early October, prosecutors told the judge in the case that the defendants treated the girl “like a toy” and “the bottom line is we don’t have to prove that she said ‘no,’ we just have to prove that when they’re doing things to her, she’s not moving. She’s not responsive, and the evidence is consistent and clear.”
At a hearing last month, the girl’s mother said her daughter remained distraught and did not want to attend school. The girl’s friends have ostracized her, and parents have kept their children away from her, the mother said.
The girl does not sleep much, said the mother, who testified that she often hears her daughter crying at night.
The mother said the obsession with high school football in Steubenville is partly to blame. It shocked her that Saccoccia testified as a character witness for the defendants last month, she said.
