Bad solution to roommate sexile situation

Parents Forum
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<p>Jonri, according to this AP article, the facebook page was created the day of his suicide:</p>

<p>This article is referencing the posts on the gay support site which have been speculated to have been written by Clementi:</p>

<p>In the “college roommate spying” post dated Sept 21, the writer is by turns cautious, angry, and worried about the repercussions if he reports the roommate to campus authorities.</p>

<p>"I could be more careful next time . . . be sure to turn the cam away . . .</p>

<p>"I’m kind of ****ed at him (rightfully so I think, no?)</p>

<p>"it would be nice to get him in trouble but idk [I don’t know] if I have enough to get him in trouble, I mean . . . he never saw anything pornographic</p>

<p>"I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out . . . and I probably would just end up with somebody worse than him . . .</p>

<p>“The other thing is I that don’t wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting ****ed at me …”</p>

<p>About two hours later, cit2mo writes his roommate had been watching the encounter with other people.</p>

<p>". . .so I feel like it was “look at what a ■■■ my roommate is.”</p>

<p>Another person comments on cit2mo’s posting, saying the roommate’s actions were illegal. “There’s an expectation of privacy in your room. Get that guy arrested or at least expelled.”</p>

<p>But cit2mo writes back: “…revenge has never worked well for me. as much as i would love to pour pink paint over all his stuff. . . that would just let him win.”</p>

<p>In subsequent postings, cit2mo writes he has reported the incident to the dorm’s RA or resident advisor and wrote an email about the events to the RA and other school officials.</p>

<p>**The next day, Clementi apparently created a Facebook account. On it he posted two things:</p>

<p>“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”</p>

<p>and “what do you get when you kiss a guy, you get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”</p>

<p>The Facebook page was taken down late last night.**</p>

<p>It sure doesn’t sound like he was yet comfortable with public knowledge of his sexual orientation. Your post creates the opposite impression.</p>

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<p>Where is the romantic partner/partners?</p>

<p>Has anything been said about who these guys are/were…and did they know about this? </p>

<p>Are they upset about the privacey? They didn’t jump.
It is tragic and suicide is never an answer.
also–I think there is more to this …</p>

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<p>I am really sad if the body found turns out to be Clementi’s. I am sad if it doesn’t, too – first off, it’s somebody’s body, and second if my speculation turns out to be true (which doesn’t seem likely), that’s not anyone’s idea of a happy ending. But none of the press stories to date has identified the body as Clementi’s, including the Post story linked above. Which, by the way, is one of the shoddier pieces of journalism I have seen recently.</p>

<p>As jonri points out, there is still no indication that anyone other than Clementi’s partner saw anything more than a kiss, or that anyone other than Ravi and Wei ever saw that much. It seems completely clear than no one “broadcast” Clementi “having sex” ever, and that the second attempt to spy on him was a bust. (If it hadn’t been a bust, Ravi and Wei would have been charged with more than “attempt” in connection with the second incident.)</p>

<p>I don’t want to defend Ravi here, because what he did was not acceptable under any circumstances, but I haven’t seen anything that registers like hate or bullying. The impression I get is a kid who was resentful (maybe a bit jealous) of his roommate’s use of the room for sex, some of whose ambivalence related to the roommate’s sexual orientation. He seems to have been too nice and too cool to object, and too much of an immature jerk not to peep and pull others in, or try to. He made some spectacularly bad choices, but nothing that seems calculated to intimidate or subjugate his roommate. If Clementi was out to his friends but not to his parents, nothing that Ravi is alleged to have done seems likely to have changed that. </p>

<p>I don’t know why Clementi committed suicide, if he did (which seems likely). Maybe this had something to do with it, but maybe it didn’t. If – and this is another big if, but one that also seems likely – Clementi was the author of those message board posts, I have a lot of trouble believing that having his roommate spy on him kissing another boy caused him to lose hope and to kill himself. Something else – a lot of something else – had to be going on.</p>

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<p>The body has now been identified. It’s Clementi.
<a href=“NJ Gov. Wonders How Rutgers 'Spies' Can Sleep at Night After Tyler Clementi's Suicide - ABC News”>http://abcnews.go.com/US/suicide-rutgers-university-freshman-tyler-clementi-stuns-veteran/story?id=11763784&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Nrds, Since there is no actual link in your post I can’t respond that well, but I think you are confused. </p>

<p>Clementi had a facebook page. On it, there was the photo of himself that has been used in many of the stories during the past week. (It says facebook just below the photo.) The quote about catching pneumonia, which makes it clear he was gay, was on there too. He posted the line about jumping from the GWB only a short time before he did so, ON SEPTEMBER 22. That was the last post on the page, but he did NOT create the facebook page to post it; he simply posted to his existing account. </p>

<p>The quotes in your story are from a gay men’s web page. It’s not connected to his facebook account. </p>

<p>The facebook page was taken down later. </p>

<p>The other facebook page is a group of people. That facebook page was not created by Tyler himself, but by a group of people who wanted to express sympathy about this horrific event.</p>

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<p>JHS, in response to your odd speculation that Clementi had "faked’ his suicide, I posted an earlier link which did indeed report that the body had been identified as Clementi’s. Post 135.</p>

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<p>I’m sorry. When I clicked on the link in that post before, it took me to a story where the body had clearly not yet been identified. When I re-clicked on it just now, the link worked and showed that, indeed, the medical examiner has identified the body as Clementi’s.</p>

<p>As everyone agrees, this is really sad. But I’m still not in the camp of those who are promoting it as a simple morality play about the sensitive, closeted homosexual boy and the vicious homophobic bully of a roommate who drove him to despair. The pieces don’t fit.</p>

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<p>JHS - I think you are underestimating the trauma of being outed to family members. I know kids who are out at school but their families have no idea - and the kid wants to keep it that way. </p>

<p>I strongly disagree with your assertion that Ravi was “too nice and too cool to object” when his roommate asked for the room. You are defending the indefensible. Ravi had evil intentions and he set his roommate up - as my children would say, his twitter post has a ‘tone’.</p>

<p>His friends are defending him by saying that he is open minded - that it wouldn’t have been different if a girl were in the room. This is somewhat true - Ravi’s behavior would have been just as illegal and equally indefensible.</p>

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<p>jonri, I will look for the link. It was a Philadephia online news site.</p>

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<p>I understand he had a facebook account, that the photo you describe was on his page, that he made a statement about catching pneumonia which refers to being gay. The news article asserts that he created the facebook account on Sept. 22. I have no idea if the article is accurate, I just quoted it.</p>

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<p>Yes, I know this. The article also states that the quotes from cit2mo are believed to be written by Clementi and the other members of that site responded to his posts. I never asserted these quotes were associated with his facebook page. I don’t know why you got that impression.</p>

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<p>Yes, the article I quoted states as much.</p>

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<p>I have no idea what you are referring to. I didn’t reference any “other” facdebook page.</p>

<p>What I got from this news article was the following:</p>

<p>1)Clementi created an alias on a gay men’s web site detailing his roommate’s web camera intrusion and expressed fear at being ridiculed for being filmed kissing a male. He received support and advice from other members regarding this incident.He followed some of it, reported the incident to his RA and verbally fantasized about gaining some sort of revenge on the roommate, then back peddled, stating it was not his style.</p>

<p>2)He created a facebook page on Sept. 22 (according to THIS article) which revealed his sexual orientation and his intention to jump off the bridge.</p>

<p>3)Therefore I concluded that he had not been openly gay (“out”) for very long at all. </p>

<p>I don’t think I’m confused, but I also don’t claim that the article is entirely correct with respect to WHEN the facebook was created.</p>

<p>Hope that makes my position more clear. Again, I’ll hunt down the link to the “news article” which contains the quotes from the gay men’s support site as well as the references to the facebook-when it was created and what was posted.</p>

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<p>The other thread (why are there two on this tragedy) points us to a Gawker article. I will put the URL-- I think Gawker doesn’t count as a blog. Anyway, you can do a Google search:
[What’s</a> It Like to Be a Gay Teen](<a href=“http://gawker.com/5652378/whats-it-like-to-be-a-gay-teen]What’s”>What's It Like to Be a Gay Teen)</p>

<p>The author points out that gay teens in high school often feel like they are just hanging on until they make it to college, where life won’t be so awful. (Too bad three other gay boys just this month found it too painful even to do that; this is the fourth gay teen suicide this September that has been publicized.) So now Clementi makes it to college. He’s not out to his family, he’s a shy, introverted kid, but now he’s in college and everything’s going to be cool. Then he finds out his roommate has been broadcasting him having some sort of sexual encounter. That could easily be the last straw, especially if one of his classmates made some remark to him that day. At some point, it all begins to seem like too much.</p>

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<p>And now Dionne Warwick (“I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”) is the earworm of the day. Thanks a lot, guys.</p>

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<p>Let’s not forget, suicide is something that is a last resort. You do it after you have lost all hope and lost your way. As vile as I find what his roommate did I don’t think it is fair to hang this completely on him.</p>

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<p>Nrds–</p>

<p>I think I found the source of the confusion. An article on northjersey.com states:</p>

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<p>That doesn’t mean he created the facebook page that night. It just means he installed an app on his cell phone which enabled him to post on his facebook page directly from his cell phone.</p>

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<p>All of you “he was just outed” people are forgetting that apparently Ravi was able to figure out Clementi was gay on the internet over the summer, before they met. And Clementi knew that at the time; they corresponded about it. Clementi may not have been out to his parents, but he wasn’t anything like closeted, either. What’s more, I wonder why people assume he would have expected a bad reaction from them if he came out to them. That’s a pretty unusual event these days in New Jersey, outside of a few fundamentalist churches.</p>

<p>I don’t mean to say that he may not have feared exposure to his parents, just that I have a hard time assuming that he did without knowing why. Or that there was some reason for him to believe that his parents were more likely to find out now than they were the previous week. </p>

<p>My kids are not “out” to me about their sex lives. And I thank them for that. But I know that they have never received any message from me that they should be ashamed of sex, whatever sex they have. Keeping your parents out of your bedroom is a natural reflex; it’s not the same as really having something to hide, or deeply fearing exposure.</p>

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<p>Gay, or straight, with or with out a subsequent suicide, turning on a camera and spying on one’s roommate and then publicly sharing the video is wrong, abhorrent and totally unacceptable. Would anyone want their child rooming with someone who would participate in this type of activity? I would hope every college is discussing this situation as an example of “don’t even think about it” with their dorm residents in the next day or so.</p>

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<p>This is bullying gone very badly wrong. Somehow many of our kids get away with bullying on the playground, in the classroom, etc. It starts with “you are different.” No way should this go unpunished.</p>

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<p>Maybe he killed himself after realizing lots of students, not just his roommate had seen it. Maybe someone who saw it made a cruel remark to him.</p>

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<p>@ JHS – you raise some very interesting questions and we may never have the answer to any of them. That’s one of the things that is so hard about a teenage suicide, so many unanswered questions. We may never know why he did it, not really.</p>

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<p>NSM, </p>

<p>If you have some basis for saying “lots” of people saw the kiss, please post it. At this point, I haven’t seen anything that suggests that’s the case.</p>

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<p>"On Sept. 21 Ravi posted, “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again”</p>

<p>I assumed this meant that Ravi was sharing the video with others. </p>

<p>[Tyler</a> Clementi, Victim of Secret Dorm Sex Tape at Rutgers University, Commits Suicide - ABC News](<a href=“Victim of Secret Dorm Sex Tape Posts Facebook Goodbye, Jumps to His Death - ABC News”>Victim of Secret Dorm Sex Tape Posts Facebook Goodbye, Jumps to His Death - ABC News)</p>