Greetings citizens of the world. We are Anonymous. Around mid-August 2012, a party took place in a small town
in Ohio known as Steubenville. On this fateful night, a life was changed forever as a group of the football players of Big Red high school began taking advantage of an
underage girl. The girl was sexually assaulted, raped
and dragged unconscious from party to party. The town of Steubenville has been good
at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected. You can hide no longer. You'll now have the world
looking directly at you. Op Roll Red Roll engaged. I knew a rape case happened
over the summer. It just seemed like at that point,
when I was hearing all that stuff, it's kind of get swept under the rug. Like, nobody would talk about it for a while. And then all of a sudden,
some guy comes on and he's not even from the area and
he's like 'I'm coming for you'. She's passed out, it's not OK. It's wrong! As soon as Anonymous posted the video,
I was like, I want to help. RollRedRoll.com is a Steubenville high
school football website hacked into last night, regarding an alleged rape case in
Jefferson County. In the video, the Anonymous hacking group threatens to
reveal personal information about people involved in the incident. As far as I know, this was the first time anything like this had happened in town. It was a situation of where you didn't quite
know what was going to happen, not knowing exactly what Anonymous stood for. All you need is a Google search engine to
realise we are serious in what we do. Anonymous is nothing more than an idea
that can be appropriated for a common cause. I don't think anybody knew really who
Anonymous is. I could probably put on a mask
and claim I'm Anonymous. There's never been a case like this
in Steubenville. It is hard to actually even get anybody
in this area to discuss rape and if they do, it's kind of a little bit and then
it's like OK, I've had enough, put the subject away,
let's go on to something else. Young people today
and even when I was young, when you have a group of kids
and guys and girls and you put alcohol in the mix, things can get out of hand. People saw these pictures and it's
horrendous, they were ugly pictures, and I understand we need to
correct that but we're not bad people. I grew up within a 90-minute radius
of Steubenville. I grew up in the tri-state area of Steubenville. It wasn't until
Anonymous was called to a local place that I'd go then. We just put the information out there
and then it's free for anybody to do whatever they see fit
with that information. I was kind of the midpoint between Anonymous and Steubenville. It's kind of like, the Spider-Man
would put his mask on or something where, you know,
Superman changes into his costume, it's like, you're kind of …
you're a superhero. And Twitter this, Twitter that,
dm's, group conversations, private messages … It was kind of a social media civil war. People went through their Twitter pages, brought up old photos, old statuses, old tweets … Getting people from outside sources
to hear the story. We can just
blow it up, 'Hey, this girl got raped, what can we do to make this story huge?' So they set up a rally for a given date. The first rally was not a lot of
organisation. People really just stood in solidarity and that's pretty much for a
few hours what happened. I just remember seeing like snowball fights. I'm looking at, like, it's starting
but it needs to move up, it needs basically production. At that point, they didn't release the 12-minute Nodianos video at the end and I knew that was coming. That's going to bring thousands of people and if it
looks like this when they get there, it's going to make a news for a day
and that's going to be that. Once that Nodi video came out, all
hell broke loose at that point. Yeah, it did. News presenter: National controversy is now growing out of a small-town criminal case
in Ohio. News presenter: People laughed
and watched, took pictures, posted pictures … News presenter: The story has now
gained national attention and has divided that community. It was sort of surreal watching CNN pull into my backyard. At first I was very angry. It was a really negative thing to live through and
honestly, since I've invested my retirement here and then built up this in. This huge negative publicity was not good. OK, I don't like the Anonymous,
the way they came into our town and they created havoc. You take it off, bro. Take it off, you take it off. And then Steubenville had a rally of their own. They say our city is divided. We must stand together and united. They say we should be ashamed to
wear red and black. I say, wear it proudly. You want us to be
ashamed of our tradition, you want us to be ashamed of our success,
you want us to be ashamed of our children, you want our children to be ashamed
of the school that they go to. This case is in the legal system. Let them handle it! A lot of the comments,
a lot of the nasty phone calls I got, you know, I'm the chief of rape city, how do I let
this go on, how can I let people get away with it … As far as I was concerned,
we didn't let anybody get away with anything. We had this case solved in the
first two weeks. I think we're being held hostage by, you know,
maybe 50/100 people. They hold this whole town hostage. They're dictating our image,
they don't even know … The outside perception is that the people are nothing but
supporters of rape … These church-going people,
we all got labelled like we're monsters here. Everybody who lives here would like to
see this story stop being in the media so we can get past it
and heal and move on. I've lived here about 40 years. I was sexually assaulted. When I called the sheriff's office I said,
'I want to see if I can prosecute'. The response that I got from the deputy
that I spoke to was, 'Oh, I know him and the prosecutor has decided
that he is not going to take the case.' After that happened, I slept with a baseball bat,
making sure the doors were locked all the time. I would go places where he normally wouldn't be
and there he would be. I was paranoid and I couldn't depend
on anybody else to look after me. So I had to do it myself. If the Anonymous group hadn't come in and brought national attention to this, I think it would have disappeared
like so many others have. This stuff goes on all the time
but it's never been brought to focus in our community. What happened with Jane Doe
was something different. I don't get involved in … I can't say the word …
activist whatever. I didn't get to the first rally. And then my sister-in-law informed me of all the
tweets and all the pictures and the video and I was like, you got to be
kidding me. So, I went to the second rally. Welcome to Steubenville, if you got
something to say come up. I had no intention of going up in there and
speaking but as soon as I got there and I saw these people talking, I just headed
right up those steps. I wasn't even thinking like, you know, Michelle what are
you doing, what are you doing? I just took off on right up those steps
and the girl got done speaking and I said, 'I want to talk.' I'm 51 years old. I was sexually molested when
I was eight years old. Never told anybody and finally
in my 40s I decided to get help. Once the testimony stuff started coming
out, it just kind of felt like a lightning bolt hit me because now it's almost turned into like
a woman's movement in a way. They just changed it. The day of the rally, my husband was like,
'You're absolutely not going, it's too dangerous.' That morning I had decided that if my
husband wasn't going to take me over then I would just walk. I just felt like,
I needed to be there. My name is Alesha, I'm a citizen of Steubenville,
I was raped in 2000, reported it to the police they called me saying that, that they
couldn't do anything for me. Some of the survivors that did speak out,
had not gotten justice and in any way this was their first time speaking about
what had happened. My name is Megan. My name's Isobel. My name is Robyn,
I was raped when I was seven. I've also been raped,
I never told anybody. It just made me feel like
a brand-new person. It's like I was set free for some reason, it just … it felt good. The town kind of came together and
everyone was handing out masks and like if you want to help,
this is what you can do. I've went to every rally,
I've seen these women speak and that was a game changer. Well, as far as public shaming,
it's harsh, it is harsh but whatever I can do,
I'm going to do and I hope that if someone's thinking
about doing something, something wrong,
that they're going to think a little bit. What if somebody found out? Something bad like that would happen
then yeah I would like to see people pull together and rally and support one another. The steelworkers do it, when they're going to lose their jobs they go to Washington, the coal miners just bust
themselves to Washington. Sometimes you have to let stuff die but then, on the other hand, you don't want
people to forget what happened. The talk needs to be about where do we go from
here and not only where do we go but where does the whole country go? This isn't an isolated case. Survivors are poised and ready to be heard.
To add to it, one of the rapists' father shot the judge of the case in 2017. The judge who was also carrying a gun, returned fire, as did a probation officer killing him. https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/22/16185174/steubenville-shooting-judge-nathaniel-richmond
The town had a rally. "you want us to be ashamed of our traditions. You want us to be ashamed of our success." well yeah if your traditions include rape and your success includes covering up for the football players responsible. All the players at that party were guilty of, at the least, not stopping the rapists.
Honestly the entire town of Stuebenville should be wiped off the map. After this poor girl brought rape charges against their star football player the entire town turned on her, going so far as to set their house on fire with the family inside. The family had to move to get away from the harrassment the town was bringing down on them. Fucking disgusting, I wouldn't mind if that entire town burned to the ground.
Anonymous has done a few things like this in the past. I head of an animal abuser getting caught, child porn ring leader, etc
A buddy from the area told me that when his school played Steubenville in basketball, the student section showed up wearing anonymous masks. He said the principal didn’t catch on until after the first game
I was quite moved when they started doing the testimonies. It is really shows how permeating the issue of rape is when a small town of people can have a large number of women just get up and recount times of being sexually assaulted. That said, a lot of them mention how they never talked about it which shows that the issue is taboo which displays the importance of breaking the social stigma around it through things like the meetoo movement. Of course, this all happened before that started, but was a precursor.
Anonymous is not exactly a 'good guy' in all situations, but this was certainly a positive result for the discussion of sexual assault at large.
Pretty full review of the whole thing in he New Yorker. Gives some interesting insight into the media reaction and how the legal system did react on the case. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/05/trial-by-twitter
I remember when this happened. I was a really big follower of the movement. I remember the main guy that really brought it forward on twitter, though I dont remember what his name was. It was so long ago.
A lot of corruption from McCafferty, the sheriff, was uncovered. He was friends with the parents of the boys that were assaulting Jane Doe. She was mocked. Ridiculed. She was a victim and people didnt believe her. They didnt want to. They swept it under the rug. One of the prossecuters had a child on the football team. It was a regular occurance every year. Its a massive problem.
I remember watching online streams of the Rally and it was moving. I cried when the testimonies were starting. I felt for these women and it was heartbreaking to know so much had just been swept under the rug.
I was raised to always stand up against bullies,protect those who need help. Have a lot of admiration for anonymous because of stuff like this. Well done, keep it up.