<p>Within two days, a user named cit2mo—apparently Clementi’s alias—was telling friends at justusboys.com, a gay Web forum, what Ravi had said. “I checked his twitter today,” Clementi wrote. “He tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else’s room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy.” Clementi went on to describe the responses from Ravi’s friends. Their entire conversation was visible on Twitter.
For the three days of their cat-and-mouse game, the roommates never saw each other in person. When Clementi wanted Ravi to vacate the room for another tryst, he texted him. But now Clementi knew which door to shut—and which window in cyberspace would show him what Ravi was up to. On justusboys.com, Clementi reported: “When I got back to the room I instantly noticed he had turned the webcam toward my bed. And he had posted online again [saying] ‘anyone want a free show just video chat me tonight’…”
Ravi’s exact tweet was: “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.” But the show never aired. “I turned off and unplugged his computer, went crazy looking for other hidden cams…and then had a great time,” Clementi told his buddies. One of them advised him: “You may want to take a screencap of his twitter feed if you want to go the legal route just so you have some evidence of his activity.” Clementi replied: “haha already there baby.”</p>
<p>yorkyfan, I think the idea that gays (and lesbians) – let alone gay and lesbian teenagers – are in any kind of privileged position in this country compared to adult heterosexual women in terms of the public outrage that follows their bullying and humiliation, is laughable. </p>
<p>And I’m well aware of how pervasive misogyny is in our culture. But it isn’t a competition. Your decision to use this opportunity to display your resentment, and to start fighting over who owns the bottom rung of the ladder, seems inappropriate to me.</p>
<p>By the way, just how many prosecutions do you think there have been under the new federal hate crimes law since it was passed? The answer is zero. And the number of prosecutions under state hate crimes laws has been extremely small compared to the number of incidents that could qualify as such.</p>
<p>Quite frankly, the lure of “producing” videos for Twitter or YouTube, etc., is pretty strong these days. Lots of kids see this as their way to be popular and cool. They think only of themselves and not of the victim or of the ramifications of their actions. These kids need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and the victim’s parents should sue for Intentional Infliction of Mental Distress.</p>
<p>it is certainly ridiculous to slam everybody who has any critique whatsoever of tyler clementi’s dormroom behavior as homophobic or hateful. it is precisely those kinds of blanket generalizations that make situations like this harder to learn from.</p>
<p>yorkyfan has a very good point: locking up ravi and wei for any length of time doesn’t serve society well. the prisons are filled to capacity in many states with people who shouldn’t be there as it is. adding two more isn’t productive, but i guess it would feel ‘satisfying’ to those who are outraged and willing to demonize ravi and wei.</p>
<p>^^calimami…so should Ravi and Wei get off with NO consequences???</p>
<p>PS…it appears (but not yet proven) that the fact that Tyler’s trysts were gay, played a factor. But it would be illegal as to what Ravi and Wei did no matter if it were a heterosexual couple.</p>
<p>"yorkyfan has a very good point: locking up ravi and wei for any length of time doesn’t serve society well. the prisons are filled to capacity in many states with people who shouldn’t be there as it is. adding two more isn’t productive, but i guess it would feel ‘satisfying’ to those who are outraged and willing to demonize ravi and wei. "</p>
<p>If they were, for instance, peeping toms who had invited friends to peep at their neighbors’ sexual activities would you feel the same way?</p>
<p>Even if their victim hadn’t committed suicide, what Ravi and Wei did wasn’t a victimless crime. I think that what they did is worse than, for instance, using someone else’s credit card, and I bet that most people here agree with me that identity theft perps should be locked up.</p>
<p>Prison is for punishment, and I think that people who secretly film others sexual acts deserve to be punished by prison. I believe that is an appropriate punishment even if their victim doesn’t commit suicide.</p>
<p>If one wants to reduce the prison population, I suggest releasing people who are serving lengthy sentences for possessing small amounts of minor street drugs.</p>
<p>soozie: no, not at all!!! i think there should definitely be consequences (and harsh ones) for their actions. but a 5-year prison sentence seems excessive, if it ever comes to that. seems to me that there are other ways to punish them that would also benefit their community, and the national community as well. when u lock them up, they’re out of sight, forgotten, and we all move on with life as usual…until the next time. serves no real meaningful purpose.</p>
<p>northstar: yes, prison is for punishment (and it also serves the purpose of retribution). but i also think that as a society we’ve used prison as a cure-all for everything, and apparently it isn’t working. there are other retributive alternatives that can be used here, but it would admittedly require a significant amount of creative thought.</p>
<p>“, if it ever comes to that. seems to me that there are other ways to punish them that would also benefit their community, and the national community as well. when u lock them up, they’re out of sight, forgotten, and we all move on with life as usual…until the next time. serves no real meaningful purpose.”</p>
<p>It serves the purpose of punishing them and warning others not to do what they did.</p>
<p>If they are sentenced to 5 years in prison, with good behavior, they’ll serve far less than that. If convicted, they’ll probably get less than 5 years anyway.</p>
<p>I think yes – although I wouldn’t want to accuse a person I have never met, and who to the best of my knowledge has done nothing wrong, of threatening Tyler. He might have broken up with Tyler, though, or might have let Tyler know that being “outed” could have devastating consequences for him (perhaps far more troublesome than those for Tyler – who seemed to be at least halfway out of the closet).</p>
<p>Something happened between Tyler’s last posts on that message board and the time when he jumped off the bridge. That something could have been a conversation with his date that changed the emotional level of the whole situation.</p>
<p>marian, i think that is from the other thread in cafe…but i cant help but wonder. agree the message board posts, already contacting ra, wouldnt lead one to think that the next step was the tragic outcome</p>
<p>Sorry if I mixed up the threads. For those of us who have been following the story, the existence of two threads is confusing – but the conversations on them have been very enlightening.</p>
<p>northstar: it’s debatable whether prison serves as a deterrent. the time-served part of their sentence would (in this case and at their age) be the least worrisome thing. 2 or 2.5 years behind bars is still a lot, but the impact on their lives will be much more far-reaching. with a conviction on their record, they will be (damn near) unemployable upon release (unless they are from families with connections or business owners). a 20 or 22-year-old with a prison record which prohibits them from making positive contributions to society is problematic on so many levels. i think we (as a nation) need to start doing better than that. </p>
<p>anyway… it’ll be interesting to hear more of the facts of the case as they come out.</p>
<p>I’m not sure anyone outside of a few who will be involved in all the fact gathering can make assumptions about cause and effect. Unfortunately a young man is dead of his own choosing for possibly many reasons.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly the kids will be kicked out of Rutgers. Certainly they have some major legal issues ahead of them. Certainly their lives will be very, very different whether they end up with actual jail time or not and the lives they lead going forward will be different from perhaps what the parents and the two envisioned a month ago.</p>
<p>"Is there any possibility that person found out and was so upset and threatened Tyler in any way… or broke up with him? "</p>
<p>Whoever that unfortunate person is, I can understand that for their own privacy, they’d be staying out of the media’s eye even though presumably the police have talked to him.</p>
<p>I thought I read something in an early story that said that the man was older than Tyler.</p>
<p>I ask again – since people keep talking about “streaming” and “producing things for YouTube” – whether anyone has seen anything factual that establishes (a) that anyone other than Ravi, including Wei, watched any video feed of Clementi, (b) that Ravi preserved any copy of that feed to show to others?</p>
<p>I am sure they feel awful. Everyone does. Ravi’s actions, at least, are pretty reprehensible, although hardly extraordinary in the history of asinine roommate behavior. I haven’t seen any description of what Wei did besides letting Ravi hang out in her room and use her computer, and I am pretty disgusted at the willingness of many of us to send her to prison for that.</p>
<p>I am confident that there was more to Clementi’s suicide than having his roommate spy on him and his date, and reading some obnoxious things the roommate’s friends put on Twitter. It just doesn’t add up. It doesn’t add up without the cit2mo posts, and with them – assuming as seems certain that Clementi was cit2mo – it seems completely disconnected. Half the reports of teen suicides I see are completely senseless – there is no reason one can assign to it at all. (I know, suicide is never rational, but sometimes there is a clear reason the kid was upset, and sometimes there just isn’t.) In this case, there’s something that might be a reason if you adjust the facts a fair amount, but that doesn’t mean that it WAS the reason, or even a reason.</p>
<p>“I am confident that there was more to Clementi’s suicide than having his roommate spy on him and his date, and reading some obnoxious things the roommate’s friends put on Twitter. It just doesn’t add up.”</p>
<p>Suicide by nature is irrational. With rare exception, the facts leading up to it very seldom match the finality and desperation of the action.</p>
<p>Of course suicide is irrational. I said that, too. But there’s a difference between the suicide of a kid who was desperate because of being bullied and suffering social rejection, and who may have feared being outed as gay, and the suicide of another kid – like a girl from the suburbs here last fall – who simply cut class one day and jumped onto some train tracks with a friend, with nothing remotely wrong with her life than anyone could tell.</p>
<p>I honestly can’t tell which category Clementi belongs to. It’s tempting to assign him to the first, except it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t being bullied, wasn’t being rejected by anyone he knew, and didn’t seem to have much concern about being outed. He was being seriously, and justifiably, annoyed, but that isn’t the kind of thing one associates with suicide.</p>
<p>I think many people assume there was much more going on in Clementi’s life and this was just one more thing. I’m not convinced there was total cause and effect in the webcam incident and the outcome.</p>
<p>^but if that incident was contributory, then culpability is significant whether it paid a small part or the entire part. The point is, it might not have happened without that incident. Sometimes suicide is a single trigger; sometimes multiple triggers.</p>