Category Archive

Evidence is mounting that Tyler Clementi turned to online forums for help in addressing his roommate’s invasion of his privacy, and that he was convinced to bring his concerns to his RA on the evening of September 21 — the day before he died.

Earlier this week it was reported that anonymous poster using the name “cit2mo” left a series of messages on the gay message board site JustUsBoys on September 21 and 22 that appear to match what is known about Clementi’s dilemma. Yesterday, a lawyer representing JustUsBoys told CNN that cit2mo had indeed connected to their site via a computer at Rutgers.

In the first message, posted early in the morning of September 21, cit2mo writes

so the other night i had a guy over. I had talked to my roommate that afternoon and he had said it would be fine w/him. I checked his twitter today. he tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else’s room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy.

He describes himself as “kinda pissed,” but unsure what recourse he has. He says he’s not sure whether he’s up for the hassle of changing roommates, adding that he doesn’t want to “report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me.”

Several other posters then chime in with advice, and cit2mo responds with more details. Later that morning he says that he’s planning to request a room change, and by the afternoon he has decided to bring the issue up with his RA, though he suspects that “the school really prolly won’t do much of anything.”

That evening he texts his roommate to ask if he can have the room again that night. The roommate says yes, but then, he writes

when I got back to the room I instantly noticed he had turned the webcam toward my bed. And he had posted online again….saying….”anyone want a free show just video chat me tonight”…or something similar to that….

soooo after that…..

I ran to the nearest RA and set this thing in motion…..
we’ll see what happens……

The following morning cit2mo posted a further update saying that the RA

seemed to take it seriously…
he asked me to email him a written paragraph about what exactly happened…
I emailed it to him, and to two people above him….

That message, posted hours before Tyler Clementi died, was the last that cit2mo ever posted to the board.

In the days since these posts were first linked to Clementi, many commenters have noted that cit2mo seems in them to be taking his situation in stride. But it’s clear as well that the situation escalated rapidly over the course of the 24 hours that elapsed after his first post to the last, and that by the time of his last message he regards the situation as far more serious than he initially did.

If cit2mo was in fact Tyler Clementi, then it appears that Rutgers dorm staff were made aware of Dharun Ravi’s spying before Clementi’s death.

And if that is the case, then the question must be asked: What was their response?

Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan Assistant Attorney General who has been waging a creepy internet campaign against an openly gay student government leader for half a year, is temporarily stepping down from his position. The AG’s office announced Shirvell’s “voluntary leave of absence” this morning.

Shirvell has been running an increasingly unhinged blog devoted to sliming Chris Armstrong, president of the University of Michigan student assembly, for nearly six months. Shirvell has called Armstrong a “pervert” on the blog, and depicted him juxtaposed with a swastika-bedecked rainbow flag (see photo at right). Shirvell has also shown up several times at Armstrong’s house to harass him, leading Armstrong to seek a restraining order against the attorney.

Shirvell served as Attorney General Mike Cox’s campaign manager in 2006, and though his employee’s bizarre behavior has been a matter of public record for weeks, Cox has thus far refused to take disciplinary action. This week, however, as the story broke in the national media, pressure on Cox has grown — just yesterday Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm tweeted that if she “was still Attorney General and Andrew Shirvell worked for me, he would have already been fired.”

Update | Published reports say that Shirvell will face a disciplinary hearing if and when he returns from his “leave.” In other news, the University of Michigan confirmed yesterday that Shirvell was from setting foot on its Ann Arbor campus, where Armstrong is a student, more than two weeks ago.

Tyler Clementi’s suicide, days after his roommate secretly shot and shared video of him in a sexual encounter with a man, hit the media a little over twenty-four hours ago. And now the inevitable creepy backlash has begun, on the blogs and the comment threads and some of the dustier corners of the mainstream media.

Folks are suggesting that Dharun Ravi’s prank wasn’t such a big deal. They’re saying that things got out of hand through no fault of his own. They’re saying he doesn’t deserve the blame for Clementi’s decision to kill himself.

To these people I offer the following five gentle suggestions:

It’s not all fun and games.

There’s a simple test for whether something is a harmless joke: is everyone participating voluntarily? If you’re messing around with friends, by all means, go ahead and be a bozo. But if you’re pranking someone who didn’t sign up for your crap you’re probably being a jackass, and you should probably keep reading.

You don’t have to intend harm to do harm.

Some of Ravi’s friends at Rutgers have said he’s not anti-gay, and that he likely would have pulled the same prank if Clementi had been straight. But teasing isn’t conducted on a level playing field. Bragging on Twitter that you caught your roommate “making out with a dude,” as Ravi did, isn’t the same as bragging that you caught him with a woman. It’s not the same, and everyone knows it’s not the same, so acting like it’s the same just makes you a jackass.

There’s a lot you don’t know.

There are indications that Clementi may have been openly gay in the dorm. If so, Ravi may not have seen his Twitter post as outing Clementi at all. But “out” isn’t binary. A person may be out to some people, but not to everyone. And a person may seem to be taking your teasing in stride but actually deeply upset by it. You can’t ever know for sure how much harm you’re doing, so it’s best to err on the side of trying to do no harm at all.

The internet is forever.

We most often hear this lesson directed at potential victims of privacy violations. “Don’t send your boyfriend a naked photo, or post on Facebook about how drunk you got, because you never know where that stuff might wind up,” that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s an important lesson for perpetrators to learn, too. Ravi may have thought that he could stream the video of Clementi without doing any long-term damage, but he couldn’t know what someone else might do with the images he broadcast. And he probably thought his bragging tweets wouldn’t be seen by anyone but his friends, but he was wrong about that too. Really wrong.

Acting like a jackass can ruin your life.

Even if we adopt the most charitable interpretation of each of Ravi’s actions — even if we give him the benefit of the doubt on every question, even if we put no blame on him at all for what happened to Tyler Clementi — we’re left with one unavoidable fact: Acting like a jackass completely messed up his life.

He’is facing serious criminal charges, and the threat of more than a decade in jail. He may well be sued for damages by Clementi’s family. He’s got pretty much zero chance of ever returning to Rutgers as a student. And for the rest of his life, this story will follow him around wherever he goes, whatever he does. All because he acted like a jackass for three days in the first month of his first year at college.

Seriously. Don’t be a jackass. Just don’t.

Malcolm Gladwell yesterday:

Question: Angus Johnston in the Huff. Post says you don’t understand social networks. If you had a chance to read the article, what is your take on his perspective?

Answer: I think what he means is that I don’t agree with him. Incomprehension is simply what a narcissist calls disagreement.

Malcolm Gladwell in the essay in question:

Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Emphases added. Hat tip to Evan Ratliff of Cazart.

“The Student Action Labor Project. Student Action Labor … notice it spells SLAP. Do you think it’s a coincidence that it’s called SLAP? ”

–Glenn Beck yesterday (at 18:30 in this video), attempting to slime the USSA-affiliated Student Labor Action Project in the run-up to this weekend’s One Nation March.