Steubenville Rape Case: Everything You Know Is Wrong

If you’ve heard about the Steubenville rape case and are trying to figure out what’s true, here’s a brief overview.

In this post, I link to some of the dozens and dozens of articles about Steubenville.  Why all the focus from liberal media? Many of the stories focus on an anti-American narrative. Omnipresent themes are America’s Rape Culture and the danger posed by America’s Football Culture and how the American Justice System is a dismal failure.  With the Left so completely invested in the story, it was only a matter of time before the non-political case would fulfill a Defenders of the Steubenville Rape Crew Embrace the GOP’s Protect the Rapist Mindset

But what if all those sources were getting the story very wrong?

What if the story were being misreported on a grand scale, full of clear factual inaccuracies and claims that nobody is making; not the prosecution, the defense, the accuser, the suspects, the witnesses, the police, or anybody connected to the case. 

What if all those sources had published complete factual fabrications that confused the case?

What if Anonymous had actually made things in the story much worse for everyone involved?

Among the widely reported and false claims:

  • Steubenville is so corrupt that no justice is possible.
  • There has been a massive cover-up in the case.
  • The victim was drugged, put in a car trunk to bring her to a series of parties, urinated on, and left for dead in a field.
  • That there a number of witnesses to the assaults who have not come forward.
  • The school’s football coaches were involved in the night’s activities.
  • That football players were given easy or preferential treatment in this case.
  • No media was covering the case except for one blogger until Anonymous got involved.
  • That no justice would happen in this case were it not for the intervention of Anonymous.
  • The infamous video of Michael Nodianos joking has anything to do with the legal case.

To reiterate, those claims are rumors that are unsupported by evidence and yet if you click on any link to a story about the case, you’ll find any number of in whichever story you read. I’ll be picking them apart point-by-point.

This is not defending the suspect or attacking the accuser. Or vice versa.Nobody involved in the legal case is making these claims. This is correcting the record. As we lay out the facts on this blog, judge for yourself and ask for proof at every turn.

Free Legal Advice For Deric Lostutter aka KYAnonymous

I am not a lawyer, so take this for what it’s worth.

I believe that Deric Lostutter aka KYAnonymous is in legal hot water for the hacking of Jim Park’s website. I think that he’s underestimating the legal trouble that he’s in. I think his lawyer Jason Flores Williams is downplaying the realities of the situation publicly and to his client.

I think the most likely outcome is that Deric Lostutter aka KYAnonymous is going to plead guilty to charges against him because of overwhelming evidence against him, most of it through his own statements.

And if that’s the case, spending a lot of time and money fighting the criminal case is a waste of time and money.

Why do I think this?

I’m quoting a few paragraphs from Gawker’s article by Adrian Chen Weaponizing The Media: An Anonymous Rapper’s War On Steubenville. None of this is good for Lostutter in any way.

We were sitting at the Waterfront Restaurant and Lounge, Lostutter’s favorite Winchester bar, on a sprawling deck overlooking the muddy banks of the Kentucky River.

Lostutter turned to a woman sitting next to us. “What did you think about that case in Steubenville where the football team raped that girl?” he asked. “And what did you think about that stuff where the hackers took down the team’s website?”

The woman gasped. She had heard about the case, but not the hacking. She asked, “Who hacked the website?”

“Some good-looking kid who’s sitting at The Waterfront with a reporter next to him writing a story about him,” Lostutter said with a huge grin. Later, Lostutter relayed that he had overheard the woman walking around telling other patrons “there’s some hacker here.”

Lostutter later asked me not to report the hacking comment. He is adamant that he did not actually hack or help plan the RollRedRoll.com hack. A hacker named BatCat later took responsibility in the Steubenville Herald-Star, saying he broke into the site in 15 minutes by guessing the password.

Lostutter said BatCat approached him one day during Op Roll Red Roll and offered to hack the site: “I formed an IRC channel, BatCat jumped in, said he could hack the site. I said OK, whatever. Everybody says they can hack.” However, in our first phone call Lostutter had told me that he logged into the administrator panel of RollRedRoll.com using a password BatCat gave him, then changed the password. Lostutter said he admitted this to the FBI during the raid. This was almost certainly illegal.

These are facts not reported by me. This is not me trying to stick the knife in. This is me pointing out reality.

Video: Reality Shift In Under Three Minutes

You watch. Things can change very quickly.

I’ve been the voice in the wilderness on a number of stories now, not just Steubenville. On stories like the John Edwards affair, uncovering rapes at Occupy Wall Street  and Pigford, I’ve been vindicated time and time again.

The trick is being right.

Why? Here’s an illustration.  This is entrepreneur Derek Sivers riffing on a point made by Seth Godin (I’m not sure who started it but I’m big fans of both Derek and Seth) and it’s exactly how you go from lone nut to New Conventional Wisdom in a snap.

Steubenville Revisionism Starts

I haven’t written about Steubenville much lately because I’m waiting for the current Grand Jury investigation to finish. I’ll probably have quite a bit to say then.

In the meantime, the ‘news’ that KYAnonymous is actually someone from Kentucky named Deric Lostutter has hit the headlines recently. Hardly anyone mentions that I was saying that publicly, for months. I interviewed Deric on my Blog Talk Radio show recently and it’s certainly worth a listen if you’ve been following the story and want to get a fuller picture.

The best piece I’ve read so far on the story is Cathy Young’s Anonymous Is No Hero. She makes a lot of relevant points.

Adrian Chen also has a good, detailed piece over on Gawker — and I don’t just say that because he calls me competent;

Stranahan emerged as the harshest critic of KYAnonymous and his Steubenville campaign. He is not exactly neutral himself, writing for right-wing propaganda outlet Breitbart.com and appearing in Breitbart’s 2012 documentary “Occupy Unmasked,” a hit job against Occupy that painted Anonymous as dangerous cyberterrorists. But he is also a competent reporter who self-funded multiple reporting trips to Steubenville and developed sources within the community. And it should be clear to anyone who reads the Steubenville Files today that it is total bullshit.

Well, allow me to retort on a couple of points:

1) Occupy Unmasked doesn’t paint Anonymous as cyber-terrorists — it paints them as vindictive bullies who threaten, harass and dox their perceived enemies. I don’t agree it’s a hit job, either — it’s providing perspective on Occupy Wall Street that the media did not.

2) It’s not that it should be clear TODAY that the Steubenville Files are total bullshit – it was clear months ago.

But I was about the only journalist saying it at the time. I wasn’t just the harshest critic; I believe I was the only journalist writing critically about the obvious bullshit and using facts to back up my assertions.

And because I did that, I was threatened, harassed and dox’d by Anonymous. Just as shown in Occupy Unmasked.

Atlantic Wire Lies Part Five : At A Party

More confounded lies from the Atlantic Wire and writer Alexander Abad-Santos, who wrote:

On August 22, Mays and Richmond were arrested on charges of rape and kidnapping. The kidnapping charge has been dropped, and Mays is also facing a charge involving illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material. (Defense attorneys did not respond to requests for comment from The Atlantic Wire.)

Why only those two? They were at a party, right? And there were all those tweets? 

Well, word spread among the students at or around the party quickly, and as the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reported, “Before the 16-year-old girl’s parents reported the crime to Steubenville police, many of the online posts had been deleted — or so students thought.”

To be fair, this is a really common error.

The sexual assaults didn’t happen at a party. They happened 1) in a car and 2) at a house where Mays, Richmond, the victim and three other boys were. It was party. It was a place then went after everyone was kicked out of the party at the Belardine house and then the group was kicked out of the Howarth house.

This also gives lie to the idea that they are scads of ‘witnesses’ who didn’t come forward. They weren’t other witnesses to the crime.

Flashback: Structure Of The Anonymous Steubenville Op

After the trial proved that nearly everything Anonymous / LocalLeaks said about blatantly false, suddenly there was a lot of revisionist history. People started saying that Anonymous wasn’t REALLY involved in the Steubenville operation and that LocalLeaks had nothing to do with Anonymous and other blatant falsehoods.

I take you back to Christopher Doyon aka Commander X interviewed on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman

X: I think, to begin with, it’s important to understand that this action involved three separate entities that are overlapping and coordinated, but separate. The cyber-action, which involved the hacking and the various other cyber-aspects, were conducted by Anonymous in a very specific cell within Anonymous known as KnightSec. And then the ground protests, which were—took place on two Saturdays in a row—this last Saturday and the one before—were handled by Occupy Steubenville, so that was their responsibility. And then the third sort of part of the puzzle was the Local Leaks, which is the disclosure platform that we have, which released a great—just a copious amount of information on this case.

Own it, people.

Flashback: Ms. Magazine Never Retracted This

Another example –there are hundreds–of how well known, ‘respected’ media hyped up the Steubenville rape case and never retracted their errors. Shame on writer Michael Kimmel: 

The two players who are charged with raping the girl, and the several other players who allegedly participated, are surrounded in a protective bubble. Their fathers steadfastly stand by their sons. Their coaches wonder what the girl might have been wearing and why she got so drunk, suggesting it might have been a case of buyers’ remorse–as if she wanted to pass out and be urinated on and have an iron rod shoved inside her, but then perhaps thought better of it in the sober light of day. The police apparently covered up the crime to protect the boys. And, of course, the community rallied behind the boys, fearing that–gasp!–“their” football team might have a dark cloud hanging over it.

Urinated on? Cover-up? Iron rod? None of it happened.

Zero accountability in the media.