Last summer, a 16-year-old girl got drunk and passed out at a house party before being attacked by Steubenville High athletes Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond. They took multiple explicit photos with their cellphones and even carried the victim to other parties, assaulting her repeatedly over the span of several hours.
It gets worse.
Apparently several of the high school’s athletes were involved. Though they weren’t charged along with Mays and Richmond, they did call themselves “the rape crew” and helped take and disseminate the photos. Anonymous staged protests and threatened to expose the boys–publishing names, social security numbers, addresses, relatives, and phone numbers–if they didn’t apologize by January 1st.
It’s January 2nd, which brings us to this astonishing 12-minute video of intoxicated Steubenville high school athletes ridiculing the victim.
All 12 minutes center around the group’s drunken jeering, though the main speaker is identified by the video’s poster as Michael Nodianos. Watch as they crack themselves up at the idea of the victim being dead: deader than a “doornail,” “deader than” JFK, Chris Henry, OJ’s wife, Caylee Anthony, and Trayvon Martin, amongst others.
“She is so raped,” Nodianos adds, “Her puss is about as dry as the sun right now.”
Jezebel’s Katie J. M. Baker took the time to transcribe some of this bile:
At around 4:15, one of his friends says, “That’s not cool bro” and “That’s like rape. It is rape. They raped her.”
He starts cracking up and riffs on that too: “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson!” and “they raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team!”
“What if that was your daughter?” one guy says. “But it isn’t,” he says.
Other choice quotes include: “It isn’t really rape because you don’t know if she wanted to or not” and “what if she was pregnant and gave birth to a dead baby?”
Nodianos, by the way, is the one who tweeted a play-by-play of the rape:
What else is there to say, really? Other than that it’s always terrible to be reminded that people like this exist.
The video’s poster is already receiving violent threats, predictably.
(This original version of this post misidentified the victim; it’s been updated throughout)
