This Made Me Mad

Wow, Katie J.M. Baker wrote an article linked below that is a pretty good whitewash of the whole ugly Steubenville business.  Way to excuse the rapists and minimize the way the town *did* try to protect those boys and attacked the victim.  


 Town Destroyed for What Two People Did

One year after Steubenville: the update serves no clear purpose other than to minimize the ugliness that happened in that town last year and highlight certain media stories that reported wildly inaccurate details. It seeks to vindicate the townspeople who claim they've been harrassed since the trial by people who believe the whole town helped cover up the rape of a young girl in order to protect the two football players who raped her, degraded her, photographed her naked body and distributed it to their friends, laughed at her, called her "whore" and made "rape" jokes.  And finally, the author of this piece wanted us to especially remember the forgotten victim in this case, Cody Saltsmann, who is serving two years in juvenile prison and will have to register as a sex offender every six months for the next 20 years.  Poor Cody is dearly missed by his family while he's incarcerated, including his sweet little six-year-old cousin who displays his picture in her room and isn't really his cousin (?!).  "Where's Cody?" she asks over and over in her sweet angelic voice.   Aww! He must be a really nice guy after all!

REALLY?!  A woman wrote this? I couldn't find an email link to share my reaction with its author, but I really could not believe what I was reading.  I just noticed the outrageous title too, fitting with the theme of how everyone, even the whole town, ended up being victimized last year over this rape case.  Was the town destroyed "by" what two people did? (i.e whatever the town suffered was brought about by the young men who chose to commit these inhuman criminal acts?) Oh no, it was destroyed "for" what they did, meaning the town got blamed for what they did, and it isn't fair and everybody's real bummed out about it, and some people have even been real mean to the people there, who did nothing wrong. But it isn't the boys' fault, it's the fault of all the false news reports that circulated in the big media blow-up claiming all sorts of wild exaggerations and giving "strangers" the idea that townspeople were complicit in the cover-up. Business owners had their livelihoods threatened by these strangers, though it isn't clear exactly how. A couple of little league kids got called "rapist" by someone on another team...something about masked vigilantes camping in a snowy driveway? and something else about googling the name of a 16 year old girl and finding her accused of drugging the rape victim and bringing her to the party.

Seriously, that's it. Okay, I believe all of these townfolk victims are going to be just fine, and if media attention on this case was what ultimately brought the rapists to justice, then I'm sure all the victims would agree what they went through was worth it. Honestly, they sound kind of whiny to me, and the whole effect of victimizing these people because they got called a name or they almost had something maybe kind of bad happen to them feels like minimizing what the real victim went through.

 I know her identity is sealed, but she's the one I want to hear about a year later. I want her to be more okay than she was a year ago and on the way to being more and more okay as time goes on. I want her to have left that brutal, self absorbed, rape excusing town behind her and never look back.  She is better than that town.

Baker shares explicitly the inaccurate details printed by the media covering this story. The stories are, indeed, grossly exaggerated or completely untrue.  However, I followed this story quite thoroughly a years ago as it broke, and I never saw these details reported anywhere.  The accurate details reported in the media were left out of this story, though, making it sound like the media blew this all out of proportion and nothing even close to what was reported actually happened.   In fact, the true events were only slightly less horrifying than the false reports, and if the cover-up was exaggerated, it was not completely fabricated or imagined. 

Honestly, I couldn't even finish reading after I got to the part where Saltsman was such a sweet boy and very remorseful for what he did, etc. I remember what he did. I remember the apology he gave to that girl and her family in court where he basically said "Oops, my bad, I shouldn't have sent that picture around to everybody like that." After the events of that night, his texts and tweets were not of a boy distraught over what he had done.  He was a boy scared he was about to get caught, trying to find a way to charm the girl's father out of pressing charges, seeking the Coach's assistance to "fix" it for him.   I honestly can't imagine what made this woman want to try and portray such a vicious little narcissist as a sweet, sympathetic figure, but she'd have had an easier time softening the image of other rapist, Ma'lik Richmond.  In contrast to Saltsmann, Richmond broke down and sobbed in the courtroom as he said his apology to the victim and her family. I don't recall what he said exactly but I remember it was a real apology. He said he was sorry for what he did to her, not "sorry it happened" or "gosh I shouldn't have done some of that stuff."

   And as for the media exaggerating the cover-up and making the townspeople look worse than they were, well, I remember at least the football coach knew about it and tried to keep the boys out of trouble. Saltsman's text message said "Coach knows about it and isn't worried about it so I'm not worried about it either."  The last I heard anything about this case, there were rumors that the coach might be arrested and charged for his role.

And before we go letting the town off the hook, let's examine what's almost completely missing from this story, the truth about what vile, horrible, ugly things a gang of kids that night did to that poor girl.  The kids came out of that town, how did they get to be so entitled and so impervious to human pain?  How were they able to drive around from house to house in that town partying like that, with a naked drunk girl and all kinds of loud carrying on?  How is it possible not a single adult was aware of what these kids were doing all night?  The town *should* be worried about what the rest of the country thinks of them because they're apparently raising their children to be animals up there and now they'd like everyone to just hush about it because it wasn't that bad and it wasn't their fault.

I remember there were two girls who threatened the victim on Twitter when the trial was over, because she had "ripped apart their whole family" with this case.  Waah!  It's a town full of whiny, victim blaming rape apologists, and the sad thing is, I think this article was intended to give me the opposite impression.