By Cliff Dunn
NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ- Jury selection finished last week in the trial of Dharun Ravi. The former Rutgers University student is charged with secretly viewing his dormitory roommate’s sexual encounter with another man via a hidden webcam.
“Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay [sic],” Ravi posted on Twitter. Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi, 18, committed suicide just days after he learned of the Sept. 19, 2010 incident. Clementi’s death is not among the 15 criminal charges the jurors will hear, but the events surrounding it are central to prosecutors’ case. LGBT rights advocates say the case underscores the tragedy of cyber-bullying as well the continuing biases suffered by LGBT persons.
Ravi, who turned 20 on Tuesday, is charged with bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, evidence and witness tampering, and other counts. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted on two of the bias offenses, which are treated as hate crimes.
Ravi also faces deportation: a legal immigrant, he was born in India and came to the U.S. when he was a child. In December, Ravi rejected a plea-bargain offer that would have resulted in no jail time and six months’ probation. Part of the plea deal he rejected was a promise by prosecutors to assist him with immigration officials should they attempt to deport him because of the guilty plea. Ravi’s attorney, Steven Altman, argued that his client engaged in an ill-advised college prank and is guilty of poor judgment at best, but that Clementi’s sexual orientation played no part in the incident and that he never intended to intimidate or harass Clementi. “He’s not guilty,” Altman told reporters when asked why Ravi turned down the highly favorable plea deal.
Ravi met Clementi at Rutgers in August 2010 when they both began their freshman year and were assigned to the same dorm room. Court documents indicate that Ravi had learned about Clementi’s sexuality before the start of school, and had made snide references to it in emails to friends. Prosecutors say that Ravi set up his webcam to spy on Clementi on the night of Sept. 19, 2010, after Clementi asked for privacy, with the likely intention of entertaining a visitor. Ravi claims the iChat webcam on his laptop was turned on because of concerns he had for his personal possessions. Court documents say that Ravi went to the dorm room of Molly Wei, a student who lived across the hall. The two used a computer to connect to Ravi’s webcam in the room he shared with Clementi.
Wei, 20, told a grand jury that she and Ravi watched the webcam while Clementi and another man engaged in intimate contact. She said that later that night she and women from the dorm watched Clementi and a man identified as “M.B.” embracing and partially-clothed. Wei says that both encounters were viewed for just a few seconds. Wei, who was also a freshman at the time, has been charged with invasion of privacy. She dropped out of Rutgers shortly after her arrest in October 2010, and has agreed to cooperate with authorities. Prosecutors also cite as evidence e-mails, tweets, and texts in which Ravi made fun of Clementi, joked about the incident, and invited friends to watch a live webcam stream on Sept. 21, when Clementi again asked for privacy.
Emails to friends indicate that Clementi was aware of the first incident, and that he shut off Ravi’s computer. Ravi has told investigators that he disabled the webcam and had no intention of viewing the second encounter. In a Sept. 22 email to the dormitory resident adviser, Clementi requested a room reassignment. Clementi wrote, “I feel that my privacy has been violated,” and that Ravi had acted in a “wildly inappropriate manner.” Later that day, at some time between 8 and 9 p.m., Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.
The victim’s state of mind might factor into the jury’s deliberations concerning the bias intimidation counts. Ravi’s attorneys noted in pretrial filings that Clementi had come out to his parents a few weeks before his suicide. At that time, Clementi wrote to a friend, “Mom has basically rejected me.” That is expected to play into the defense’s picture of Clementi as a confused teen who was struggling with issues of identity and other emotional problems. Joseph and Jane Clementi, Tyler’s parents, have formed a foundation in the teen’s memory to offer grants to organizations engaged in bullying and suicide prevention, as well as programs that focus on gay teens. Clementi’s parents have said that Ravi should be held accountable for his actions, but have asked for leniency in the punishment he receives.