A curious American has opened a rape case: now she is being persecuted around the world
'10.08.2019'
Source: Lenta.ru report
Seven years ago, the American Alexander Goddard was shocked by the news from the hometown of Styubenville. 16-year-old local resident was drunk to unconsciousness and raped by members of the football team. For a quiet American city, the case seemed out of the ordinary. Literally everyone in Styubenville considered local footballers infallible heroes: they were proud of them, they were set as an example.
In search of the truth, Goddard turned to the Internet and found that the well-being of cute Styubenville is actually imaginary. Rape was covered by dozens of people, moreover, they did not see anything reprehensible in it. Goddard hardly suspected what a seemingly local disruption of the covers would turn out for her. Teenage girls learned about the rape in all of America, and the whole Styubenville turned against the Internet detective for taking out litter from the hut. How Goddard exposed the idols and why she still has to hide - in the article "Tapes.ru».
City pride
In the tiny city of Styubenville, Ohio, school football players look like celebrities: everyone in the town knows their names and watches their sporting lives. Locals stop them on the street for an autograph, fans give them gifts.
In the late 1990's, Alexandra Goddard left Styubenville, where she lived all her life. She often recalled the “ridiculous” rules that prevailed in the city: the status of a person depended on whether he had a son and whether he could play football. When in the 2012 year, Alexandra saw on the news a short report about two football players from Styubenville High School who were arrested on suspicion of rape, she could not understand how this could happen.
“I understood that for a small town this event was truly large-scale - why in the local news this was spent almost at least a minute?” Alexandra asked.
Now, the story of Styubenville, in which on the night of 11 August 2012, football players Trent Mays and Malik Richmond raped an 16-year-old girl, is known around the world and is called a model of manifestation of a "culture of rape" - a culture in which sexual violence against women is considered normal. In a society dominated by a culture of rape, habitual social relationships, prevailing customs and norms, the media often normalize and even justify sexual violence against women. Rape in Styubenville is now on such a scale, but in the 2012 year, only two paragraphs on the local news site focused on this.
In a small town, literally hidden in the hills of the Ohio Valley, there are only 18 thousand people, and the nearest large settlement is an hour away. As far back as the 1990's, almost all the inhabitants worked at the steel mill, like their fathers and grandfathers, but since the factory closed, the city seemed to freeze. The Steubenville Big Red football team was the only thing the city residents were proud of.
“Here, players are considered heroes, and it's rather sad: because of this, a lot of things get away with them,” said Jim Flanagan, a native of Styubenville. “Everyone just looks the other way.”
“Reading these terrible things was simply unbearable”
When Alexandra Goddard heard about the rape on TV, she hadn’t lived in Styubenville for 10 years, but this story caught her attention. Alexandra is an “Internet detective”. She has been running the Prinniefied.com blog since the beginning of the 2000's, where she thoroughly describes the nature of the crimes, the criminals themselves and their victims. In her youth, Alexandra collected crime magazines and carefully studied how real detectives reveal the most complex cases. In 15 years, she got a job in the office of an assistant lawyer and began to study the psychology of criminals and the motives for their actions. Alexandra suspected that the consequences of the story of the rape in Styubenville could well be understated due to the fact that the suspects are football players of the favorite team. She easily found information about athletes on the football team website and their profiles on social networks. She felt that there would be something worthy of her blog in this event. And she was not mistaken.
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Alexandra found what shocked the inhabitants of Styubenville, and then the whole world. The guys leaving the city to study in college had a farewell party, after which some football players and their friends on social networks shared their impressions of last night. “In just a few hours, I got a pretty clear idea of what was happening that night,” recalls Goddard. “With each new record, it got worse and worse: how many people knew what had happened, and none of them did anything to stop it.”
The teenagers mentioned the “dead girl” and made dirty jokes about rape. “I do not sympathize with whores,” one of the schoolchildren described his impressions of what had happened. It was obvious that Trent Mays and Malik Richmond took advantage of the fact that one of the girls drank the excess, and raped her. In addition, they took the drunk girl to other parties that night, and it is not known exactly how many acts of violence were committed. One witness shared his conclusion on social networks: “The song of tonight is Rape me of Nirvana.” Trent Mays posted photos of a naked raped girl, and he seemed to see nothing wrong with that. “She knew what was going on,” he commented.
The Internet detective also found a photo on Instagram in which two teenagers carry a girl unconscious. The author of the publication made a signature - “carelessly”, which corresponded to the picture. The teenagers also mentioned the video on which the act itself was recorded, but Alexandra could not find it anywhere. But she found out that the victim of violence, 16-year-old girl woke up the next day in the basement of an unknown house. She could not find her clothes, did not know how she got into this house, and also did not remember half of the events of that night. The girl found out that she was raped in the morning from social networks.
“Reading the terrible things that were said about this girl was simply unbearable,” recalls Alexandra Goddard. But even more online detective upset the reaction of adults to this incident. She began to browse the sites of local “message boards”, the site of the football team, in order to comment on the mood of society. What the adults wrote about the victim of gang rape was simply unthinkable: they found out what the victim was wearing, argued that she should not go to the party at all, because she had a “bad reputation” and that she should not drink alcoholic drinks. “They blamed the victim for everything,” Alexandra stated. One of the high school students published on Twitter: “If a girl is raped and she does not resist, then for me it is not rape. Of course, I sympathize with her, but still ... " Witnesses from among the guys from that ill-fated party recalled: the victim was so drunk that she could not walk or even stand. They knew that she was being raped, but decided not to do anything.
"People should have seen those terrible things."
Confident that the world should know about what happened at the party, Alexandra took screenshots of Twitter posts and photos on Instagram and posted them on her blog, previously blurring the victim’s image in the photo to hide her identity. “Usually, I can easily cope with emotions in a particular business, but this time it was not easy,” says Alexandra. “I, too, am a rape victim, but I didn’t tell anyone about what happened.” To see what they said about the poor girl was very difficult. I did not comment on the screenshots, because the publications of the boys spoke for themselves. No matter how hard it was for me to cope with my memories, I felt that people should have seen those terrible things that teenagers wrote. It was no longer just that she was raped. They humiliated her. ”
Alexandra Goddard was well aware that the residents of Styubenville love their football team and will be angry at it for such a publication. But the reaction of the locals exceeded all her expectations and fears: she was accused of deliberately spoiling the lives of football players and Styubenville’s reputation. Although Goddard only collected all the party-related materials published by teenagers, she became the "number one enemy" for the entire city. Not only that, she began to receive numerous threats to life. "It was terrible. The family of a high school student along with 25 commentators on my website sued me for defamation, ”Alexandra says excitedly. - The case was quickly closed, but for a long time I was afraid that this would happen again. I stopped blogging and regretted making this post at all. ”
Trying to help Alexandra, her friend posted an emotional post on Twitter, labeling her with the hashtags #FreeSpeech and #Anonymous. Thanks to this, the story received further unpredictable development.
“No need to arrange a prelude with a dead girl”
In January 2013, just four months after the first news of the rape, something happened that made Stuyubenville football players known to the whole world - hackers from Anonymous hacked the accounts of one of the teenagers and downloaded the video that Alexander Goddard had searched for in due time. The 12 minute video was shot by Michael Nodianos, a former member of the Steubenville football team, who had already been in college by then. In the video, Michael laughs and jokes with Mace and Richmond raping a girl unconscious. “No need to prelude with a dead girl,” Michael joked. In the video, one of the teenagers present asks Michael a question: what would he have thought if his daughter had been attacked. “If it were my daughter, I would not care. I would just let her die, ”he replied.
“What he said laughing hysterically is simply disgusting. It showed me the rape culture in which we live. “Boys will always be boys,” as they say, but this is nothing more than the normalization of sexual violence, the idea that this is all just a joke, ”Goddard concluded.
Anonymous uploaded the video to the Internet, hacked the Big Red football team website and published it there to attract more attention to it. The video became viral and scattered across the network with the hashtag #OpRollRedRoll. “This video was everywhere, and finally, in addition to trolls, adequate people appeared expressing support for the girl and anger towards the players. And finally there were more than trolls, ”recalls Alexandra. “But I was still afraid that one of the football fans threatening to kill me would find out my address and find me.”
Most of Alexandra's friends and old acquaintances, who still lived in Styubenville, supported her for such a bold move. But there were those who literally hated the Internet detective. “They wrote me anonymous letters with the wishes of a painful death. Once a threatening letter was sent to me by someone I knew before ... Even now, people are angry with me. Friends from Styubenville advised me not to return to the city, Goddard says sadly. - I do not understand such a reaction. People are sure that I made our city bad. But I do not agree. It’s not a bad city, but people who were involved in this crime, and those who simply turned a blind eye to it. They made Styubenville look bad for the whole world, not me. ”
“No one said,“ Stop, this is wrong. ””
This story received wide coverage in national media, and protesters from across the country came to Styubenville to restore justice under the slogan Occupy Steubenville. They gathered outside the city courthouse, and local women said they were the same victims of violence as the 16-year-old girl at the party. “It was very touching, I could not hold back my tears,” Alexandra recalls.
Pending the trial, Mays and Richmond were under house arrest. Their parents claimed that the boys were not guilty, and lawyers assured the public that their clients were unfairly convicted on the Internet, but a real court would acquit them. Three Stuybenville high school students testified against stellar footballers. The mother of the injured girl announced threats against her family - additional police patrols patrolled the neighborhood of her house.
“What bothered me the most was that when this happened, there were other people around,” said William McCafferty, Chief of Police at Styubenville. - No one said: “Stop, this is wrong.” If we could punish people for dishonesty, many would go to trial for the events of that night. ”
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On 17 March 2013, Trent Mays and Malik Richmond were found guilty of rape in a juvenile court. Richmond was sentenced to only one year in prison, and Mace to two - for distributing naked photographs of a minor victim. For comparison: against programmer Derick Lostatter, a member of the Anonymous hacker community, law enforcement officials charged him with hacking at the Steubenville school website and demanded 16 years of imprisonment as punishment.
“I would like to apologize to her family, my family and society. No photos needed to be sent, not to mention taking them, ”Trent Mays said at a court hearing, without commenting on the act of violence. Richmond cried in the courtroom: “I was not going to do anything like that. Sorry to make you go through this, ”he said.
Despite the fact that the fault of the players was proven and the case closed, the public - representatives of the rape culture - involuntarily sympathized with the young people. Public anger was caused by the words of CNN journalists, who commented on the judge’s verdict sadly summed up: “Two young men who had such a promising future, football stars, very good students, literally watched their life collapse in the courtroom.”
“I immediately packed my things and moved”
Alexandra Goddard still receives threatening letters. In October of 2013, her worst nightmare came true: Alexandra's address was published online. “Despite the fact that I lived in California, far from Styubenville, I did not feel safe, because abusive messages came every day from all over the country,” Alexandra explains. “I immediately packed my things and moved.”
Today, seven years later, the comments of people dissatisfied with her investigation appear on the Internet detective’s page every day. She is still blogging alongside her work as a legal consultant. She is looking for a more permanent job, but it’s not so simple: “Employers just google me and don’t want problems,” says Goddard with a laugh.
“I have more doubts when I publish something,” Alexandra admits. - But in spite of everything, I am glad that I took the right side and spoke out. Progress has definitely been made, although the wheels of justice spin very slowly. ”
She is sure that a sharp sense of justice has inherited from her mother. “She was German and always told me:“ When you do the right thing, other people will most likely not agree with this, and you will be left alone. ”
“The more we talk about it, the more we inform our children and teach them to be more than just witnesses, the faster we get closer to destroying the culture of rape,” Alexandra is sure.
