Social media casts spotlight on Ohio rape case

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/03/justice/ohio-rape-online-video/index.html

By Michael Pearson, CNN
updated 2:17 AM EST, Fri January 4, 2013

The videos, pictures and tweets are chilling. A picture of a girl dangling limply from the arms of two young men.

Other boys, laughingly saying the girl had to be dead because she didn't flinch as her body was violated.

An alleged rape, made into a joke.

The images and social media messages are at the heart of criminal charges against two high school football players accused of sexually assaulting an underage teenage girl during a series of end-of-summer parties in August.

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Anonymous has released information about the town and the football team and is threatening to release more unless everyone comes clean about what happened that August night.

"The town of Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected," an Anonymous member wearing the group's trademark Guy Fawkes mask says in a video posted to the group's LocalLeaks website.

The organization, he says, will not allow "a group of young men who turn to rape as a game or sport get the pass because of athletic ability or small-town luck."

The girl was assaulted the night of Saturday, August 11, and early the next morning, according to authorities.

Involved, according to authorities, were members of the Steubenville High School football team, demigods in the small, down-on-its-luck town along the banks of the Ohio River. A website dedicated to the team counts down the seconds to their return next fall.

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"When I first came across the article, I just felt like -- because it was involving football players, and there is a culture there that football is very important, that there was probably a little more to this story than what the local media was reporting," she told CNN Thursday. "So I started doing my own research."

One image circulated online and posted on a website maintained by Anonymous showed the girl, dressed in a T-shirt and blue shorts, her body limp, being held hand and foot by two males who appear to be teenagers.

Text messages posted to social networking sites that night seemed to brag about the incident, calling the girl "sloppy," making references to rape and suggesting even that she had been urinated on, according to Goddard. CNN has not been able to establish whether this is true.

In one 12-minute video, posted by Anonymous on Wednesday, one teenager makes joke after joke about the girl's condition, saying she must have died because she didn't move during one assault.

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Meanwhile, Anonymous says it is collecting detailed information about the personal affairs of football boosters and others in the town of 18,000 who the group claims may have helped cover up the attack. It's also planning a protest "to help those who have been victimized by the football team or other regimes."

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