Many say football players are given special treatment, won’t be held liable for actions
Kim Schmitz
News Editor
The judge in the Steubenville, Ohio rape case has declared the trial open to public viewing, despite concerns about the victim’s and defendants’ safety. The trial has been postponed from Feb. 13 to March 13 after requests from defense attorneys.
Steubenville, a declining steel town across the Ohio River from the West Virginia panhandle, was thrown into the spotlight in August of last year when two high school football players were accused of raping a teenage girl during a night of partying.
Though the alleged assault occurred in August, a new wave of attention has hit the town in recent weeks. Protest groups have infiltrated its streets while online petitions multiply. The well-known hacker group “Anonymous” has also leaked a chilling video taken from one of the alleged assailant’s computers, in which he jokes and brags about the rape.
The case provides an interesting look at the unique social world in which young people communicate: a blurred limbo between the physical and cyber realms. While attending parties is still a big part of youth culture, to be without a smartphone while you’re there is to miss out on the photos, tweets, updates and videos, which merge several venues into one online scene.
In the Steubenville case — a town where “everybody knows everybody,” according to the judge — social media updates from the evening in question are serving as critical pieces of evidence. Without them, the prosecution would have little evidence. After the incident, phones and tablets were confiscated so that experts could search them for deleted records of what happened to the teenage girl that night. She herself remembers very little.
One of the foremost questions asked about the case is why more evidence was not brought forth willingly and why more witnesses have not taken the stand if so many people seem to have seen the crimes that allegedly took place. More saliently, why did no one try to stop the defendants before they acted as they did?
One witness, a fellow football player who has agreed to testify for the prosecution, is responsible for videotaping one of the defendants doing inappropriate things while the girl was naked and semi-conscious. She “was just sitting there, not really doing anything,” he testified. “She was kind of talking, but I couldn’t make out the words that she was saying.”
This witness is one of few who have decided to testify. When local police knocked on doors in the town of about 18,000, several people agreed that the players’ actions should not be tolerated. However, they refused to reveal their identities to the press for fear of hostile attitudes from football fans.
Steubenville is a football town: the kind of city that closes down on Friday nights to cheer on the Big Red high school football team. The two defendants are celebrated members of the team, and accusations abound that football players receive special treatment to the point where they can seemingly do no wrong. “There’s a set of rules that don’t apply to everybody,” said Bill Miller, a former Big Red player, to the New York Times. “This is nothing new. It’s disgusting. I can’t stand it.”
Wooster student Bryan Kovalick ’13 said, “I grew up 30 minutes downriver from Steubenville and I can attest to the fact there is nothing holier than a high school football player, save for a football coach, in the Ohio Valley.”
But William McCafferty, the Steubenville police chief, appears extremely frustrated each time this allegation is made, according to the New York Times. “It’s always, ‘They said players are getting away with things,’ but when I ask who ‘they’ is, no one can tell me,” he told them.
McCafferty is reported to have found the events last August to be “disturbing,” and appears to have done everything he could to round up witnesses and evidence. Someone who seems to be less convinced that a crime was committed is the team’s coach, Reno Saccoccia. Though two of his key players were unable to play this season because they were in jail and on house arrest, he decided not to punish any other players who may have witnessed, recorded or participated in the crime. Other city officials trusted his judgment of this matter. Saccoccia made the decision after players who posted media about the assault stated that they did not think they had done anything wrong.
However, three athletes did choose to testify in court, and were suspended from the team soon afterward.
Kovalick, a member of the Democratic Socialists at Wooster, has said that the group “would be interested in being involved with some effort to address the rape culture in the U.S. like in Steubenville.” Though he is not confident that football fans in towns like Steubenville will change their protective attitudes toward their players, he does hope that “similar communities [can] realize the danger of sanctifying every action of a select group of people and then looking the other way and making excuses when they break the law.”