Dharun Ravi grew up in Plainsboro, New Jersey, about three or four miles from where I grew up in Princeton. He went to West Windsor-Plainsboro High School, my high school’s main rival. His trial begins today. He’s the notorious Rutgers University roommate of Tyler Clementi, the young man who jumped off the George Washington Bridge three weeks into his freshman year, presumably because Mr. Ravi had used a webcam to spy on him and another man, and then tweeted about it.
I just read Ian Parker’s long profile of this case in the New Yorker, and I now realize that the early reporting was inaccurate. I was under the impression that Ravi had taped Clementi having sex with another man and then had posted footage of their sexual encounter on the internet, thereby outing him. That’s not what happened.
Ravi is very good with computers, and he developed a way of remotely activating his webcam through iChat. He dimmed his monitor and then accessed his camera from a friend’s computer across the hall. What he and his friend saw was two men apparently kissing. They watched for a few seconds and then turned the camera off. Then they started tweeting and instant messaging about it. Later on, after a few people had come to the room (and Ravi had stepped out for a smoke), the camera was turned on again for a few seconds. This time, Clementi noticed the green cam-light go on and moved to go turn the camera off. But before he got there, the light went off by itself. During this second viewing, Clementi and his partner had their shirts off. Nothing was taped, and no footage was posted on the internet.
Clementi confirmed that he’d been spied on by reviewing his roommate’s Twitter feed. At that point he began seeking advice and taking steps to get a new roommate. If this is all that had happened, maybe there wouldn’t be a trial going on. Unfortunately, a few days later Clementi asked Ravi to vacate the room so he could have another date with his partner. This is when things went deeply wrong. Ravi, not realizing that Clementi knew about the prior invasion of privacy, planned to spy on their encounter again, and he invited people to call in to his computer so they could watch, too. Once again, he tweeted about it, not thinking about the fact that Clementi could read his tweets. Clementi turned off Ravi’s computer and unplugged the power strip. He searched the room for evidence of any other hidden cameras. And then he had his date.
But he wanted a new roommate, and he talked to the resident adviser. The next day, Clementi talked to his mother and sounded normal. He went to symphony practice. Then he came back to the dorm, wrote out a suicide note that he put in his backpack, took a bus to the train station, made his way uptown to the George Washington Bridge, and posted the following to his Facebook app on his iPhone: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”
Now Ravi is on trial:
…last spring, shortly before Molly Wei made a deal with prosecutors, Ravi was indicted on charges of invasion of privacy (sex crimes), bias intimidation (hate crimes), witness tampering, and evidence tampering. Bias intimidation is a sentence-booster that attaches itself to an underlying crime—usually, a violent one. Here the allegation, linked to snooping, is either that Ravi intended to harass Clementi because he was gay or that Clementi felt he’d been harassed for being gay. Ravi is not charged in connection with Clementi’s death, but he faces a possible sentence of ten years in jail.
The charges really stem more from the incident that didn’t take place than the one that did. And the case for bullying may ride on a peculiarly 21st-Century discussion of whether Ravi should have reasonably expected Clementi to read his tweets (thereby, intentionally bullying him) or he obviously thought he wouldn’t read them (because they would have tipped him off).
Regardless, I can’t see a 10-year sentence as justified. I won’t win many friends by sticking up for this kid, but there’s no evidence that he wanted to bully his roommate or that he had any special hatred of gay people or that he knew his new roommate enough to know that he was vulnerable and potentially suicidal. In no way did he want his roommate to die. And Clementi was already out of the closet to his friends and family.
By all accounts, including his own, Mr. Ravi is an asshole. And his plan to have his friends watch his roommate engage in a sexual encounter with another man was not only incredibly stupid but plainly criminal. He should face charges, but jail time seems extreme. Ten years seems very extreme.
When I first heard about this case I was disgusted and wanted some harsh punishment. But many of the key details were wrong. I imagined that the suicide was related to the humiliation of having his sexual encounter posted on the internet and the trauma of being unwillingly exposed as gay. Neither of those things happened. No one ever saw Clementi having sex, nor did he think they did. And, while he assuredly didn’t appreciate people discussing his sexuality on Twitter, he was open enough about his sexuality to visit a meeting of the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance during his first weeks in school. He was open enough with his roommate to ask him to leave so he could be alone with another man. If Ravi’s criminal invasion of his privacy led to his death, it must have been more of a last straw for someone already wrestling with some serious demons.
I’m not a psychologist and I didn’t know Mr. Clementi. But after reading about him and Mr. Ravi, I don’t think Clementi would want his roommate to be facing 10 years in prison. I think he’d want him expelled, and to maybe pay a small penalty like a fine and community service. I think Mr. Ravi might, on his own accord, make it his mission in life to educate people about the dangers of picking on gay people, or kids who are weak, shy, or can’t defend themselves. I think Tyler Clementi would like that, too.