How the documentary Roll Red Roll connects #MeToo to Steubenville

In 2012, the otherwise unremarkable town of Stuebenville, Ohio, became the center of a nationwide discussion about rape culture. That year, an inebriated high school student was dragged from party to party and repeatedly sexually assaulted — acts that were documented on social media. Now, seven years later, Roll Red Roll, a new documentary directed by activist Nancy Schwartzman, explores the enduring cultural implications of this case by focusing on the role social media played in it, both in terms of the incident of sexual assault itself as well as how the use of social media for change and conversation surrounding the case set a precedent for the explosion of the 2017 iteration of the #MeToo movement. 

Roll Red Roll opens with a re-telling of the events at the center of the case. Viewers learn that the survivor of the Steubenville High School rape woke up the morning after her assault in an unfamiliar basement with two high school football players, Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond, naked and unaware of what had transpired the night before. She was only able to patch together what happened to her from tweets, videos, and pictures of her assault that bystanders and the assailants themselves had posted on social media. The documentary pieces together the assualt for viewers through images of these tweets and picutures, including “The song of the night is Rape Me by Nirvana,” and “I have no sympathy for whores.” Some referred to the victim as “dead girl.” 

The documentary lingers on one post in particular: a picture of the survivor, asleep, being carried by her hands and feet by Mays and Richmond from the second party to a friend’s basement, where the assault occurred. The picture reappears multiple times throughout the film, stressing the non-action of the bystanders who chose to post and tweet about the assault instead of actively stopping it from taking place. This repetition pushes viewers, particularly male viewers, to think about their own roles as bystanders in both past incidents as well as ones that could occur in the future. 

On August 22, 2012, the survivor and her family pressed charges against Mays and Richmond. True crime blogger Alexandria Goddard states in the documentary that during the police investigation,  she mined for and then shared the witnesses’ social media posts. Once Goddard publicized the posts, the town erupted into discussion on social media. Instead of protecting the welfare of the victim, however, many members of the community supported and defended the alleged assailants; they were interested in protecting their town’s culture, specifically the football careers of the assailants. The coach of the Big Red football team exclaimed:

“The rape was just an excuse, I think. What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that? She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.”

To further ensure the protection of Mays and Richmond, their families and families of other witnesses sued Goddard for defamation because she shared these posts. 

At this point, the documentary shifts to explaining how the town’s backlash caused the cyber activist group Anonymous to get involved in December 2012. Enraged by what they saw as injustice in Steubenville, Anonymous leaked records of posts deleted on social media that showed witnesses mocking the assault, and garnered international support for the victim. Social media was then used to organize two large-scale rallies in support of the victim during the trial. The doc emphasizes how important this involvement of social media was to force the community of Steubenville to confront the normalization of sexual assault and rape culture within the town. As a result, the community began to express more support for the survivor, and adults within the school system were held accountable for trying to protect the assailants. 

Despite this support, however, one assailant was ultimately sentenced to just a two-year minimum sentence, and the other a one-year minimum sentence in a juvenile detention center. Today, they are free and play college football; one assailant was recruited to the Youngstown State football team, the other to the Central State football team. 

About five years after this assault, the #MeToo movement definitively proved how powerful social media has become in the fight to shift the collective consciousness of society by allowing otherwise marginalized voices to be heard and holding people who have abused their power accountable. In many ways, the Steubenville case can be seen as a precursor to this movement in that while it was initially used to humiliate and scrutinize a rape victim, it ultimately helped reveal crucial evidence in the case, legally hold the assailants accountable, and raise awareness of similar cases on a large, public scale. Roll Red Roll is an essential watch, as it provides an incredibly important context to the contemporary conversation on sexual assault.