After picking up the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2013 for his film “12 Years a Slave,” Brad Pitt announced that his production company, Plan B, was asked to produce a film adaptation of the Rolling Stone article “Anonymous vs. Steubenville.”
The article details the story of Deric Lostutter, a member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous who helped to expose the cover-up surrounding the rape of a 16-year-old girl by two high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio.
With Lostutter currently facing more years in prison than those that actually committed the crime or attempted to cover it up, a growing number of people see his story as a strange and convoluted miscarriage of justice and an indictment of the overzealousness of the U.S. Department of Justice’s crusade on computer crime.
In Steubenville, however, the concerns about the film and the continued attention on the case are closer to home. Most in the town would rather let the story fade away.
“I think it hurt the city — the innocent people who had nothing to do with this,” a Steubenville resident who asked not to be named told MintPress News.
“It’s going to ruin Steubenville,” added Lynda Kane, a resident of neighboring Weirton, W.Va. “It’s already ruined Steubenville.”
“Football culture”
On Aug. 11, 2012, a female high school student from Weirton left a party heavily intoxicated and “out of it,” according to reports from fellow partygoers. The student was party-jumping with four Steubenville High School football players, and she had visited at least one other party. Sometime around midnight, according to trial transcripts, the student and the football players left the party, at which point, the female student was partially undressed, fondled and digitally penetrated in the backseat of a car. The event was filmed and photographed. In the basement of a house, the student was orally raped, stripped fully nude and digitally penetrated — also while being photographed. The football players returned to the party and shared the photographs.
Some of the recorded material made its way to YouTube.
In the weeks and months that followed, a cover-up started to set in. With the victim herself having no memories of the assault — short of waking up once to vomit in the basement and waking up in the morning next to two males and half-dressed — the perpetrators requested a friend to “just say she came to your house and passed out,” while pleading to the victim herself not to press charges.
Steubenville is a small community with an exuberant amount of pride in its high school football team. In 2012, the team was having a winning season. It was alleged that the school’s football coach, Reno Saccoccia, and other members of the school and town administration actively worked to “bury” this story.
Op RollRedRoll
Lostutter, who had developed a tendency to stand up for anyone being bullied, read about the Steubenville High School rape case and the cover-up attempts in an article in The New York Times. After being contacted by Alexandria Goddard — who was being sued for defamation at the time by the family of Cody Saltsman, one of the teenagers involved in posting photos of the rape victim from the night of the incident on Twitter — and her friend, sexual abuse activist Michelle McKay, Lostutter “took the case.” Goddard and McKay passed on the incriminating photos and tweets they had been collecting to Lostutter.
Calling his operation “Op RollRedRoll,” after the football team’s slogan, and naming his Anonymous team KnightSec, as in the White Knight, Lostutter posted an Anonymous video, claiming to have doxed “everyone involved” with the cover-up and crime. He said he would release the private information online “unless all accused parties come forward by New Year’s Day and issue a public apology to the girl and her family.”
The video was posted to the high school booster club’s website by Noah McHugh, a Virginia Beach, Va., hacker who took responsibility for the act.
Lostutter would later post a second video, alleging that the school’s webmaster, Jim Parks, had pictures of underage girls on his computer that the football team may have provided to him. The FBI eventually disproved this claim and Anonymous apologized to Parks.
Spurred on by the popular support for his efforts, though, Lostutter organized two “Occupy Steubenville” rallies on behalf of the victim. More than 1,000 people attended the rallies outside the city’s courthouse, with many sharing their own stories of sexual assault and rape.
When the New Year’s Day deadline came and went without anyone coming forward, Lostutter posted a 12-minute video sent to him from an anonymous Twitter user. The video showed Michael Nodianos, a former Steubenville student-athlete, joking drunkenly about the rape on the night of the attack.
“They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction,” Nodianos says in the video, adding that they “peed on her. That’s how you know she’s dead, because someone pissed on her.”
The post triggered a massive data dump — labelled “the Steubenville Files” — from a site called Local Leaks. The information detailed alleged crimes committed by prominent members of the community, as well as a new timeline for the rape and tweets from Cody Saltsman stating that he had “never seen anything this sloppy lol” and “I have no sympathy for whores.”
Desperate for normalcy
In the end, though, Lostutter’s story revolves around a town desperate to return to the normalcy that was lost in the wake of the rape and the cover-up. After the data dump, death threats and hacking attacks flooded the town. Lostutter himself was shunned by Anonymous because of the perception that he had become a leader in a leaderless organization. As the chaos escalated — eventually leading to an FBI raid on Lostutter’s house — there was a sense that the victim was lost in the noise and justice wasn’t done in the push to “move past” this issue.
Two of the high school football players — Ma’Lik Richmond and Trent Mays — were convicted of rape. Mays is sentenced to serve a minimum of two years in juvenile detention, while Richmond has been released after just one year behind bars. Two of the school administrators accused of helping to cover up the incident had their charges dropped in exchange for community service.
Lostutter faces 10 years in prison in relation to the video threatening Parks and allegedly hacking Parks’ computer. Should be praised or condemned for his role in drawing attention to this story? That’s not clear, but one thing is sure: no one should have to make threats in order for justice to be served. It may take a movie to remind the world that no one should be forced to stay quiet for the sake of someone else’s comfort.