Rape culture unmasked: “Roll Red Roll” comes to theaters and PBS’ POV

Nancy Schwartzman’s debut feature documentary, Roll Red Roll — arguably the most visceral, devastating, alarming portrayal of what rape culture looks like in real life that has ever been filmed — is at last having its U.S. theatrical release. It began at the Film Forum in New York City (3/22-4/4), moves to the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Los Angeles (4/5-4/11), and will open PBS’ prestigious POV series on June 17.

Roll Red Roll — the chant for Steubenville, Ohio’s Big Red football team — may also be the most powerful work we have ever had with the potential to change the attitudes and behavior of men and boys that fuel rape culture. On the heels of its premier at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018 and showings at numerous festivals since, the filmmakers hope to harness that power in earnest this year, with a campaign to invite hosts for community and campus screenings nationwide, beginning in April, Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Roll Red Roll centers on the notorious 2012 sexual assault case involving a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio. Though we never meet the victim in this film, her blurred image had already been burned into many of our minds. In a photo that went viral, millions saw her limp, apparently unconscious body, grabbed by her wrists and ankles, dangling from the arms of two high school football stars as they move her from room to room. On that night of several pre-season parties for Steubenville’s Big Red football team, those boys and several others drove that inebriated girl around to three locations, while they and their friends texted and sent out cellphone photos, yukking it up, as the molestation proceeded.

We get our first glimpse of the whole ugly enterprise through the eyes of true crime blogger Alex Goddard. She found a small article about the assault, did a deep dive into social media, took screen shots of the heinous communications about the event that she found online, and re-posted them. With the later efforts of Anonymous, the decentralized international hacktivist group, an avalanche of publicity began to make clear what happened that night. Anonymous’ involvement culminated in a rally on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse in support of the girl, at which woman after woman came up to the mic — removing her trademark Anonymous mask if she was wearing one — and revealed that she too had been sexually assaulted.

The film shows what the football players and their friends — assailants and observers, online and on site — said and did as they frolicked through the assault and its aftermath. While the victim did not remember what happened, “the cellphones,” as the prosecutor would later say, “told the story.” We learn that one boy tried to insert his penis in the barely conscious girl’s mouth; he and another digitally penetrated her vagina. Boys took and shared photos, posted text and video commentary, saying things like: “Never seen anything this sloppy lOl … Whores are hilarious … She is so raped right now … Dead body … You don’t need any foreplay with a dead girl … This is the funniest thing ever!” The level of vitriol, of dehumanization, is breathtaking.

In its bracing, suspenseful retelling, Roll Red Roll provides a vivid, soul-crushing portrayal of the reality of rape culture. We know that some boys talk this way, behave this way, betray the trust of young girls, turning on them with sneering impunity. But here we experience it, all of it. The camera leads us step by step, from the local streets to the site of the abuse, from interviews with shopkeepers to visits with families, from the police station to the courthouse, the trial, and the verdicts — two juveniles guilty of penetrating the victim while she was unconscious (in Ohio law, rape includes digital penetration), and one guilty as well of disseminating pornographic pictures of the victim. We learn about later indictments of school officials for failure to report and of another similar incident, involving a 14-year-old girl, that had happened just a few months before.

The film’s through line is provided by footage of the investigation led by a thoughtful, dogged police detective, J. P. Rigaud. He admits to being stunned by the level of victim-blaming he encountered, reporting that he was stopped on the street repeatedly by people holding the girl, not the boys, culpable. Those sentiments came through loud and clear in the film, for example, from the bakery worker, a former football player, who said, “Nine times out of ten … the woman engaged in it”; the local talk radio personality who said, “These girls at these parties sometimes maybe drink a little bit too much, sometimes they get a little promiscuous … It’s easier to tell your parents you were raped than [say] hey, mom, dad, I got drunk and decided to let three guys have their way with me”; and the oblivious coach who said he was at first going to suspend the boys for drinking that night, but then didn’t because “it would make them look guilty,” even though he also said, while they didn’t “rape” the girl, “they might have screwed her.”  

The detective’s disappointment is palpable when he says: “There were definitely moments in that night when you had hoped for some kind of a hero, or someone to step in.”

Roll Red Roll raises those issues and many others — the power of peer pressure; the ubiquity of underage drinking; the knee-jerk reaction of some adults to defend the boys; the impact of male privilege and female objectification; the closed ranks of football culture; the limitations of the law and school policies; and the shocking nature of the whole ordeal, captured in the plaintive cry of one Steubenville mother who said: “How do you have children that think that’s OK?”

Long using her work to highlight the issue of violence against women, Schwartzman, a survivor herself, wanted “to make a film about rape that didn’t rely on a victim’s testimony to drive the story.” By so brilliantly shifting the focus — in her words, to “perpetrators, bystanders, and witnesses … the larger communities and institutions that enable rape” — Schwartzman raised what is surely the most urgent question posed by the events in this film, one that echoes long after the credits roll: How will we change the boys? 

To host a screening, click here.  

For more on the film and where to see it, click here.

For a timely, in-depth interview with director Nancy Schwartzman by former WINS radio news anchor Sandi Klein on her popular podcast “Conversations with Creative Women,” click here.