The Steubenville Rape Went Viral 7 Years Ago. This Documentary Looks At What Happened Next

there really is a scene in Roll Red Roll — the documentary that examines the culture surrounding the 2012 Steubenville, Ohio rape case — that rapidly establishes the ways in which the town's citizens protected and in several ways enabled the teenage males who were eventually convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl on the night of August 12, 2012. It takes place in a donut shop; the man beyond the counter tells filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman that he takes a word like “rape” very seriously. Nevertheless you get the sense that his discomfort has more to do with one individual accusing another person of rape than the specifics of the survivor’s story.


He isn't alone in the sentiment, either. Two teen ladies tell the cameras that any girl who was drunk — as the victim, who is only referred to as Jane Doe, was the night she was assaulted by Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond — should take responsibility for putting herself in such a position. The blatant victim-blaming is astonishing to watch, nevertheless frustratingly, isn’t surprising; it also serves as a sobering reminder that for several people, the impulse isn't to believe survivors, especially as soon as the attackers are people in power. And in some towns In the
U.S., Few folks are more powerful than the high school football players.


“I used to stay in Steubenville, where the high school football players are treated like NFL players,” Alexandria Goddard, the writer who served because the first whistleblower for the case, tells MTV News. Because the documentary explains, she had been reading a local newspaper one day, any time as soon as she found something was amiss. A little article detailing the allegations made against Mays and Richmond seemed also short for the severity of the crime levied against them: the rape of a minor.


“I thought that there was a lot more to the story and that the local media was probably not giving it the coverage that it needed because it was that football team,” she remembers right now. “I went out to the football website, I pulled the team roster, and just began going through social media.” What she noticed was an incriminating trail of social media posts from the gentlemen and their companions that turned one girl’s nightmare into a punchline. She posted screenshots on her blog; that post opened the floodgates for attention first from the vigilante order Anonymous, and later by the New Yorker and other national outlets. The story went viral, not least of all because here was proof that rape culture still laughs in the face of sexual assault, 140 characters at a time.


The Steubenville story could have been a cautionary tale, if it wasn’t for Goddard sounding the alarm. By several accounts, the girl was drunk at a high school party on a summer night — drunk enough to puke on the sidewalk, also drunk to walk, also drunk to consent to anything, let alone sex. People at the party saw that she was drunk, although did not intervene once Mays and Richardson took her to another party, and later to another location. Any time as soon as she woke up, she had no memory of what happened. No one had stepped in. No one had stopped her attackers. Most people were more invested in protecting the rapists, rather than the survivor.


“What I thought was so critical about what Alex did, is that what she uncovered and knew was crucial was that cultural part of it,” Schwartzman explains. “So while some of these [social media posts and] texts aren't necessarily criminal evidence, they're evidence of this larger culture where rape is tolerated and joked about and thought of as no big deal. Law enforcement may not think a tweet is a part of criminal evidence. However Alex made sure that stuff doesn't get deleted or disappeared.”


It was that culture that Schwartzman wanted to interrogate in Roll Red Roll, which is currently in select theaters right after hitting the festival circuit in 2018. The film uses footage from police interviews with teens who were at the party, along with conversations with Goddard and parents and students inside the Steubenville community, to illustrate the ways in which attitudes in the town have and haven’t changed in the years since Mays and Richmond were convicted of rape.


“This is a larger conversation that we need to have about how these young boys are talking about ladies Schwartzman says. "Where is the empathy? Why is it acceptable and tolerated? So that's what inspired me to keep looking and keep digging.”


Roll Red Roll isn’t an easy film to watch, without consideration of how well-known the case is currently. Among its artifacts is a minutes-long YouTube in which one Steubenville High student talks almost gleefully about the rape with a crowd of his peers; only one other boy in the video tells him to knock it off.


“Once I began fanning out into people who were involved, into their friend network, into their family member network, it became increasingly disheartening,” Goddard recalls. “First, we have kids that are talking about this for hours, all night, as this was going on. And not one individual stepped forward. Alternatively they laughed at her and continue to spread it on social media. And yes it was not just the kids, it's parents and other adults and teachers from the school who were trash-talking her and saying really horrible things. It changed me.”


Both Goddard and Schwartzman are survivors themselves, and so they grappled with how much data to show, and any time to hold back. If she first posted the screenshots, Goddard pixelated and blurred the body of Jane Doe, although larger media outlets were not giving her such privacy. And right now, because the film rolls out into theaters in New York and Los Angeles, along with at private screenings across the nation, Schwartzman is leveling with the fact that the film would likely trigger other survivors.


“If they don't hope to watch it, that's completely fine,” she says. As an alternative, she asks that they prioritize their own self-care, and to lean on companions and allies to help. “This film, because it's so visceral, was really designed to engage, to shock guys out of their comfort zone,” she adds. “It’s saying, ‘This is the language and you’ve been around it and you also have teammates that speak this way and you also know guys in your fraternity speak this way and it's ugly, right?’”


The film — shot in 2017, right before the Harvey Weinstein allegations blown up the ways we talk about sexual assault and compounded upon movements like Tarana Burke’s Me Also — feels prescient. It’s also easy to forget that even 10 years prior, large swaths of society were willfully ignorant to the realities that several people, and especially ladies, faced every day: that one in six females will be the goal of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, that several of these females will be attacked before they turn 18, that the vast majority of rapes are never reported. Hopefully, those numbers will change, though it can be also soon to tell just yet.


For her part, Goddard has already felt one wave of change: “Back in 2012 once this first broke, I didn't have several males allies to talk about this with,” she notes. “I feel like today, there really are so several more gentlemen who are more than ready to step up to the plate and mention publicly, 'This is wrong, what can we do to correct this? How can we make change?' Just over the last seven years and with all of the ugly things that have happened, boys are more OK with the fact that, yeah, they require to step up, they have to do something too.”


“Maybe five years back a film about rape would have been relegated as a women's allocate. Right now I feel like folks are like, 'Oh my gosh, this is a American epidemic,'” Schwartzman adds. “This is a cultural offer. This is how males are being socialized and this is a problem. I visualize a tremendous willingness to address rape culture that wasn't there before.”


While Steubenville serves because the backdrop for Roll Red Roll, it’s far from the only town where rape culture abounds. “This isn't unusual,” Schwartzman stresses. “I went to high school outdoor of Philadelphia. We didn't have football, nevertheless we certainly had rape culture.” She remembers the “rich kids” preying on freshmen in particular, and that male and female classmates alike often contributed to victim-shaming. To that end, she hopes the film serves as however another wakeup call, especially to those people who may not realize the ways in which they’re still enabling rape culture to thrive.


“Just because this is a culture we inherited doesn't mean we have to continue it,” she adds. “We really have to change the system and we can't change it if we don't visualize it.”