It’s 4:00 in the morning and I still can’t stop thinking about this horrible story. I’ve been sick over it for the past day or two.
An 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University killed himself. Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge. His body was recovered last Wednesday.
And we instantly found out that he killed himself over what has amounted to shame and grief and a horrible invasion of privacy, and some of the worst cyberbullying I have seen in a long time.
Dharun Ravi, Mr. Clementi’s roommate at Rutgers, and another student, Molly Wei, both 18 years old, are currently charged with invasion of privacy, in that they conspired to surreptitiously videotape Clementi having sex in his dorm room with another person – and then broadcast the sex tape over the Internet.
Make no mistake – this was not a prank. This was a calculated attempt to shame and embarrass Clementi. That sex tape has most likely propagated itself around the world. It can never be erased. It’s stored on the hard drives of a million computers by now.
What Ravi and Wei did was beyond horrible. What were they thinking? Or WERE they thinking at all? What benefit could they have gained by doing this to another person? For laughs? For a prank?
We’ve gone past the old form of bullying – the kids waiting at the bus stop to beat someone up, or the snickering in the hallways regarding a fellow student’s ethnicity or faith or preference. Now it’s videotapes of kids getting beaten up and posted on YouTube. It’s Facebook groups suggesting that so-and-so is a slut. It’s an imposition of shame and subjugation on a scale previously unimagined.
With a video camera and available social media, someone can have their private lives appear in public, whether they want to or not. They can’t pull those videos off the Internet any more than a celebrity can yank their embarrassing pictures out of the National Enquirer. These kids can’t take down the Facebook groups. All they can do is stare at what has happened, and replay over and over in their mind, “Oh my God, my parents are going to see this… I can’t explain this to them… The people who I thought were my friends destroyed my trust … I have no one to turn to …. my life is over … why would anybody do anything like this to me … nothing I can do will repair this damage …. Goodbye.”
And sadly, the image of a smiling boy with a violin will soon be relegated to a slew of “true crime” television shows. 48 Hours Mystery should have something on the Clementi tragedy by the end of the year. His story will be rewritten into a “ripped from the headlines” episode of Law and Order: SVU. He’ll probably end up on an E! countdown show of college tragedies and internet tragedies. He never deserved this. Nobody deserves this.
Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei committed a crime – a crime of invasion of privacy and cyberbullying and destruction of another person’s life. They may have even committed a hate crime, if the courts can prove they did this as an assault on Clementi’s sexual preference. There’s also the possibility of them receiving charges of manslaughter, if it can be proven in a court of law that their actions were a direct cause of Clementi’s suicide.
Ravi and Wei will have to live with what they did to Tyler Clementi for the rest of their lives. Both students are eighteen years old. Eighteen years old, old enough to do something this disgusting to another person.
And the worst thing about this whole story –
It won’t be the last time someone gets cyberbullied and has nothing left but despair. All the seminars and lectures in the world won’t stop this from happening again. As long as someone has a camcorder and less than an ounce of human decency, it will happen again.
And that part hurts the most.
Rest in peace, Tyler Clementi. You deserved better than this.
Chuck The Writer 
I was sickened too. This tragedy is appropriately being called a hate crime against a gay person, but it resonates with all of us because of the bullying aspect. Bullying raised to a nuclear war level by use of the Internet – especially against gay and lesbian teens but as you stated, Chuck, faith, ethnicity – any difference. I was at the wrong end of bullying. albeit much less intense, in grade school just because of the clothes I wore. I cringe now, thinking what classmates would be sharing around about me on Facebook.
Another disturbing aspect being discussed is the loss of sense in kids’ minds nowadays of what is public and what should be private. The students who published the video, it is said, may not have realized that Tyler’s – or their own – sex life is a private matter. Just as my generation needed to be retaught that plagiarism of term papers is wrong, kids now may need to be taught to recognize and respect privacy. I realize Ravi and Wei need to get due process and fair justice, but part of me wants them to be made a severe example of in criminal or civil court, that will “resonate” in the mind of the next bully thinking of secretly taking a picture or video and posting it, and make him or her think twice.
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I too have been sickened by this story. Thank you for a thought provoking post. Rest in peace, Tyler and bless his family.
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