When Rape Just Doesn’t Matter As Much As Privacy (What the Actual Hell, Ohio?, Part 4)
TW: discusses rape
A FaceBook friend posted a link on my page. The incident is related to the Steubenville High School rape case I wrote about here.
In 2012, members of the Steubenville football team gang raped another high school student. The assault was then posted to a team fan website, called Roll Red Roll. In December of 2012, a video was released from “KYAnonymous,” which featured material taken from the Roll Red Roll computers. The Anonymous video included photos and videos from the site, as well as threats to expose further details about faculty and family who helped cover up the crimes. After the two perpetrators, Trent Mays and Malik Richmond, were arrested, a number of staff and faculty were charged with covering up the crimes. Mays was sentenced to two years, and Richmond was sentenced to one year (he served 10 months).
The person behind the Anonymous video, Eric Lostutter and co-conspirator, Noah McHugh, were tried for hacking into the Roll Red Roll computers. According to Reuters, McHugh pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a computer. Lostutter has also pleaded guilty to two counts, one count of conspiracy and one count of making a false statement to federal agents. Lostutter is currently awaiting sentencing, but he faces up to five years for each count.
In other words, he could get ten years, while the two rapists got one and two, respectively.
The case highlights A) a broken judicial system, and B) fundamentally skewed priorities.
I am not suggesting the McHugh and Lostutter did not break the law. I am also not suggesting they are angels. They are not. While they, by their own admission, were motivated by the rape and wanted to expose the rapists and the adults who actively covered it (and other assault, too, by the way) up, they were also motivated by self-interest. In his plea agreement, Lostutter wrote that he was also seeking to gain notoriety for himself and his online personality, KYAnonymous. In addition, he admitted to hacking into the computers at Roll Red Roll, and then lied when asked about his role in the hack and KYAnonymous video. Those are crimes.
So, Lostutter’s self-interest muddies the waters a bit. Had he been purely motivated to expose the rapists and get justice for the victim, then the case would be clearer. Nevertheless, his actions were precipitated by a sense of injustice, and his actions did lead to the arrest and conviction (such as it was) of Mays and Richmond. Further, it exposed the utter corruption in the school regarding the knowing and willful cover-up of sexual assaults. Both of those things, I would argue, were social benefits.
At the same time, we are more and more dependent on computer systems. They hold our personal data, our financial data, our medical data. All of these systems are under constant attack by criminal individuals and entities. They want to steal and monetize the data that we consider private. As it should be. We have criminalized this digital invasion of privacy. And Lostutter and McHugh violated the digital privacy of the school and the organization.
And, yet, Hays and Richmond violated the body and person of their victim. They drugged her. They dragged her bodily out of the party. And they raped her. They then published images and videos of the assault. They bragged of it. They called themselves the “rape crew.”
In my mind, those two things are not comparable. In my mind, what Mays and Richmond did is vastly more grievous that what Lostutter and McHugh did. Our reactions to the two crimes should reflect that. Our laws should reflect that. The punishments should reflect that.
Of course, our legal system has been developed hodge-podge. It has grown over time, without much logic or system. And it is often reactionary. Things such as computer hacking could never have been imagined 100 years ago. But it was only after computers and cyberspace developed and only after people started breaking into other people’s computers that the law tried to catch up, often by applying previous statutes and guidelines that do not really apply.
We also know, for example, that low-level offenders often get harsher sentences than those who commit serious crimes. Emma Andersson writes of a woman who got a 159-year sentence for driving a get-away car. Whistleblowers sometimes face a harsher sentence than those they are exposing — especially if the criminals are wealthy.
Kim Zetter, at Wired magazine, writes of the history of hacking and the statue used to prosecute it. The anti-hacking statute was written in 1986, and first used in 1989.
In an opinion piece from 2013, Alex Pearlman writes about the relationship between hacking and rape. Pearlman addresses the Steubenville rapists, Mays and Richmond, and another hacker, Andrew Aurenheimer, who was not associated with the Steubenville case; he just happened to be sentenced within 24 hours of Mays and Richmond. Aurenheimer had committed several “large hacks,” including one on AT&T. Aurenheimer had actually made a lot of money off his hacks. Charged under the above-mentioned 1986 statue, “Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for using public information to expose a security flaw in AT&T’s system and telling the media about it.” As Pearlman notes, the rapists got 24 and 10 months.
These priorities are skewed. We must value humans, human life, human bodies more than we value money, property, and data. Yes, sometimes that property or data gets stolen, and yes, sometimes that can have very real effects on people’s lives. It should still be a crime. However, what happened to the young woman in Steubenville should always outweigh the privacy rights of the Steubenville “rape crew” and of the criminals covering it up. Every. Damn. Time.
Ritch Calvin is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction and editor of a collection of essays on Gilmore Girls.
