A warning—this post is on a difficult subject to discuss. Not only am I unable to tell the full story and incapable of being impartial or unsentimental, but I may still very well fail to do the Clementi family justice. If it weren’t for my own siblings, I wouldn’t have made the attempt.
In this week’s New Yorker, Ian Parker reexamines the ongoing case of Tyler Clementi, a household name for the worst reasons a parent (or frankly, a student) could imagine.
Using Tyler’s own words and interviews with witnesses and family, Parker creates an incomplete but valuable portrait of a reserved, thoughtful teenager who had just come out to his family when he started his freshman year at Rutgers University.
Several weeks into the semester, he was sexually harassed not once, but twice by his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who spied on him via webcam and posted about it on Twitter.
“Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
Parker makes a point of noting Ravi’s ignorance or indifference towards the public nature of the internet, a core issue in some of the charges he currently faces.
Before Ravi locked down his Twitter account, a few days later, he had about a hundred and fifty followers, the bulk of them friends from high school. It’s possible that he still thought of his Twitter audience as a group no larger than those followers. In truth, his audience could have included anyone who searched on Twitter for “Dharun.” Perhaps Ravi expected Clementi to read his tweet; or perhaps he didn’t bother to consider that he might. […]
Soon after Ravi’s tweet, Molly Wei began an I.M. conversation with Austin Chung, her boyfriend, then a college student in Hoboken. Wei began, “OMG AUSTIN” and then: “OH MY FKING GOD.” She handed the keyboard over to Ravi, who told the story—guest, webcam, embrace—then let Wei resume typing. Chung asked “DID YOU TAKE A PIC,” and she replied that they should have, but added, “Nah that would be TERRIBLE.” Chung said that the news made him want to “throw up,” even though Clementi was “mad nice.” Wei replied, “He’s NICE but he’s kissing a guy right now / like THEY WERE GROPING EACH OTHER EWWW.” […]
“Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.” Alissa Agarwal, a student living in Davidson C, walked across campus with Ravi, and others, after supper that evening. She told police that although she had been “zoning him out,” she heard him “bragging” about his plan to broadcast Clementi’s date. The group went to Agarwal’s room. Prosecutors allege that, at 7:44 P.M., Ravi used Agarwal’s computer to check the iChat connection with his own computer.
That evening, Ravi also texted with Michelle Huang, a high-school friend who was at Cornell. “I have it pointed at his bed and the monitor is off so he can’t see you,” he wrote. And, “It’s set to automatically accept, I just tested it and it works.” He later added, “be careful it could get nasty,” and “people are having a viewing party.” […]
Clementi read Ravi’s “happening again” tweet sometime before mid-evening—and this seems to have ended his doubts about taking action. Just before M.B. was due to arrive, Clementi went to see Raahi Grover, a resident adviser. Grover took him seriously, and asked him to repeat his story in an e-mail. He also offered him a spare bed in his own room for that night. Clementi declined, and returned to his room.
He unplugged Ravi’s computer. In a text sent at 9:41 P.M., he told Yang, “I was afraid he might have hidden another webcam so I also shut down and turned off the power strip.”
In the mishmash of insipid online commentary, it seems that not a single person protested against Ravi’s vile invasion of someone’s privacy.
On September 22, 2010, seemingly without warning and with only the words “jumping off the GW bridge sorry” in a Facebook status, Tyler took his own life. Molly Wei and Dharun Ravi were both initially charged for invasion of privacy. In spring of 2011, Wei entered a plea deal in exchange for a “pre-trial intervention program” and possible testimony against her co-defendant. Ravi was indicted on 15 criminal counts, including invasion of privacy, witness tampering, and bias crimes. If convicted, Ravi stands to serve 5 to 10 years in prison.
I realize I’ve only barely scratched the surface of Tyler as he is now remembered, the face of a movement against cyber-harassment and the plague of suicide among gay teenagers. Even after reading Parker’s piece, I can’t be sure whether Tyler might have come to the same end at a different time. He may have suffered with depression or even contemplated suicide before that autumn. It’s likely he started at Rutgers with the sense that he had damaged his relationship with his mother. While she tells Parker she’d reacted to his coming out with guarded but loving acceptance, Tyler told a friend he felt “completely rejected.”
I’m not certain that harassment was the sole factor in Tyler’s death, and while I find Ravi and company grotesque, at this moment they are too pitiful even to waste disgust on.
What matters are these — the simple, devastating words of James Clementi to the brother he knew and loved. I’m only enclosing some of them in this post and recommend you read all of them.
It was the Fourth of July. We had spent the day at the movies, the diner, the fireworks. So many opportunities, and I kept chickening out. That night, I found him in the house listening to Katy Perry, and I saw that, if I couldn’t do this now, something was really wrong with me. I overthought it — because it ended up being this simple.
Me: “I’m gay.”
Tyler: “Oh. Me too.”It was great because we had always known, but now we could talk about it. I saw so much relief and genuine happiness in his face. It felt like the beginning. We talked for hours about sex, relationships, bars, fake IDs, homophobia, everything that had been off-limits before. I was really taken aback by how assured and poised he was, how much better he understood himself and his desires than I did at 18. It was startling, but it also fit with my sense of him as a young man, still figuring it out but grounded in his own worth and value.
Two months later, he left to start his first semester at Rutgers. I think he left excited to grow up, to live life. I was looking forward to the days ahead and the years of brotherhood still to come.
Hey Ty,
So the other day I was at Barnes & Noble, trying to find a book to read since I have a lot of free time now that I can’t sleep, can’t hold a job, don’t want to be around friends or family, and pretty much need to escape my life. Anyway, I was browsing at the newsstand and I saw you. I always do. This time you were staring back at me from the cover of People. I keep thinking that I’ll look up and see you for real, the way you should be, but it’s always more reminders of the way you are. I’m sure the other customers found my anxiety attack entertaining. How am I supposed to respond to seeing you on People, though? It’s a lot to digest, you being a celebrity and all. I always knew you would make it big; I just thought you’d be around to enjoy it.
I wonder what you would think, seeing all the commotion you’ve caused. It is surreal and meaningless to see you as a mere story on The New York Times, a brief glimpse at a life with none of the detail. You were a typical college freshman, trying to adjust to a dorm room, make some friends, meet a cute guy, and enjoy your independence, and no one noticed. The headlines tell of how you were violated and ridiculed; your last moments are a cautionary tale, a scandal, something to sell and entertain.
You are on every talk show, newspaper, and blog, being held up as the issue du jour for the masses to “care about,” like they ever read you a story or wiped away your tears or spun you around in the air until you were dizzy. I wish it didn’t take you dying for your soul to know peace. I wish you could read the hundreds of letters we got, hear the thousands who rallied and marched for you, know the millions who followed your story on the 6 o’clock news. You were never alone; it just felt like it.
When you were here with me, you had no idea how important you were, and it took your death to make that point. Now you are gone. How will you know how much I love you, how much we all do? It’s not like you can read your big cover story. It’s not as though you can hear me crying.
Dear Tyler,
I guess I never really told you how much I admire you, how much I wish I was more like you. We came from the same gene pool, the same family, the same town, the same schools, the same church, everything the same. But I always saw a confidence and strength in you that I didn’t recognize in myself. Where did you get that? When I thought about where I was going to be in five or 10 years, I could never picture it — my mind would be blank. But when I imagined your future, I saw the world at your feet. You were supposed to show me up, do it better than I could. I wanted that for you. I saw amazing professional accomplishments for you, but also personal ones. I know now that you felt so alone, but Jesus Christ — you are so, so easy to love, with your kind eyes and gentle heart. I know so many people you had yet to meet that would one day love you almost as much as I do. Even after what you did, I cannot see you as a sad or depressed or lonely kid. To me, you will always be my sweet, tender little brother.
I’ve heard the story so many times: how you did it, the night you jumped. The first time, and every time I’ve been told about it, read it in a paper, heard it on TV, or dreamt about it at night, it still confuses me. I know you and I know that is not who you are. And that is never how I will think of you, alone and cold and at the end.
You are youth, potential just beginning to unfold. You are blood, my connection to the past, and my hope for the future. You are beauty, fleeting and marvelous. I know there was pain, and I’m sorry for that, but you were joy, too. Your voice, your smile, tiny hands clinging to mine. I will never let go.
Without discounting the special venom of homophobia and the susceptibility of gay teenagers to suicide, it is in these letters that the death of an adolescent just coming into his own as an adult should resonate far beyond the arena of gay rights.
All I can do is hope there will be something more than darkness on the horizon for the loved ones of every Tyler Clementi, Carl Walker Jr., Jaheem Herrerra, Jamey Rodermeyer, Phoebe Prince, Jessica Logan, Jon Carmichael, Matt Epling, or Eric James Borges. I hope that their survivors will come to a place where memories are not recalled in consummate despair and that tomorrow’s would-be casualties at the edge of a precipice find a lifeline or are given the resources to fight. I hope this generation appraises the shallow barbarism–all the more horrible for its ordinariness and frequency–that so often forms the thread among sons, daughters, siblings, and friends who will never age beyond the photos consigned to obituaries, one name after the next lost to the pages of a local newspaper or a school bulletin.
And finally, if there is any benevolence in the universe, I hope that James Clementi gets to experience life as his “twin” probably would have wanted him to.
