Nancy Schwartzman (2018)
A local radio station in Jefferson County, Ohio broadcasts early reports of an alleged sex crime. The anchorman describes the incident as ‘very much a he-said-she-said at this stage’. The assault of an underage teenage girl, the subject of Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary Roll Red Roll, didn’t stay that way for long. Sixteen-year-old Jane Doe, as she’s referred to throughout (with occasional bleeps to erase her real name when it crops up in police interview recordings) was too drunk to remember how she came to wake up naked in a basement room, in the company of three teenage boys. They were much more communicative, having taken and sent to their friends photos of what was being done to her. Phone messages to and fro supplied a running commentary on the events of the night. Marianne Hemmeter, on behalf of the Ohio Attorney General’s office, prosecuted at the subsequent trial of Trenton Mays and Ma’lik Richmond (also both sixteen when the assault took place). Hemmeter tells Schwartzman that the Steubenville High School rape, as it became known, was one of the first cases to rely on unarguable evidence of this kind. The defendants condemned themselves out of their own texts.
In 2012, when the crime was committed, Mays and Richmond were leading lights of the Steubenville High School football team. According to trial transcripts, the already intoxicated Jane Doe left a party with them and two of their football teammates. They called in briefly at another party, where the girl appeared to be ‘out of it’ and vomited. Twenty minutes later, they headed to the home of a schoolmate, Mark Cole. On the car journey there, Mays raped Jane Doe and exposed her breasts while his companions took photos and videos. In a basement room of Cole’s house, Mays attempted oral rape on the girl, who was now unconscious. Richmond then had vaginal sex with her. More photographs were taken and shared. The stream of phone messages continued in the immediate aftermath of the crime: Mays begged the victim not to press charges and told Mark Cole to ‘Just say she … passed out’. The bulk of the evidence presented in court comprised hundreds of texts and phone photos, taken by more than a dozen people and subsequently transmitted via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Mays and Richmond were tried as juveniles and judged ‘delinquent beyond reasonable doubt’ (the equivalent of guilty in a juvenile case). Each received a one-year sentence for raping Jane Doe while she was unconscious. Mays was given an additional year’s sentence for disseminating pornographic images of her.
The main evidence was unusual both in a technical sense and in (thereby) recording so graphically the callous derision of the boys concerned – who numbered more than two. Cody Saltsman, another Steubenville footballer, posted on Instagram a photograph of the unresponsive victim being carried, by her wrists and ankles, by two other boys. A YouTube video featured Michael Nodianos, who was on the baseball rather than the football team, joking that ‘They peed on her – that’s how you know she’s dead because someone pissed on her’. Mays likened the victim to ‘a dead body’ and described her as ‘deader than Caylee Anthony’ (a two-year-old girl murdered in Florida in 2008). The case quickly became a national cause célèbre and an expanding cultural indictment. It exposed the pernicious potential of social media and jocks-will-be-jocks team spirit. It shone a disturbing light too on the local community ethos more widely.
The high school football team was – perhaps still is – a source of fervent pride to the citizens of Steubenville. Schwartzman’s film is named for the team’s supporters’ traditional come-on-you-reds-equivalent chant. There are scene-setting shots of high-school boys and girls co-operating in a more positive context – footballers and cheerleaders lining up to receive the acclaim of their families and friends. For viewers (like me) who come to the film with no advance knowledge of its subject, Roll Red Roll delivers a real sting in the tail. As media interest in the case snowballed, there were persisting rumours that high-school employees, notably the football coach Reno Saccoccia, tried to protect the boys involved for the sake of the team. Shortly after Mays’ and Richmond’s conviction in March 2013, the Ohio Attorney General set up a panel to investigate whether other similar crimes might have been committed. At least one had, in April 2012: the victim, a fourteen-year-old girl, came forward in the light of the publicity around the August 2012 assault. On this earlier occasion, the school authorities more successfully kept a lid on things. The panel investigations led to the indictment of five adults on various criminal charges, mostly tampering with evidence and obstructing the course of justice. They included the IT director and the superintendent of Steubenville City Schools. The latter, Michael McVey, appears briefly in Roll Red Roll, offering a news interviewer stonewalling assurances that the relevant procedures were all correctly followed. McVey can’t help the way he looks and sounds but he comes over as a perfect representative of boorish rigidity.
The same local radio voice who announces breaking news of the crime is soon heard again, editorialising along the lines that sometimes girls have a few drinks, decide they want sex then claim afterwards that they didn’t. He isn’t alone in begging the question of what Jane Doe was capable of deciding. Two Steubenville High School girls take the line that she has to take responsibility for her decision to leave the first party with Mays, Richmond et al. (It’s worth noting, whether or not it made a significant difference to the feelings of these two girls, and others in Steubenville, that Jane Doe wasn’t a local: according to Wikipedia, she was from Weirton, West Virginia.) Ma’lik Richmond’s defence attorney says the victim decided at some point of the night to hand over her phone: he virtually elides the distinction between this and consenting to all that happened subsequently. The same attorney goes on to note that the boys were drunk too and asserts that, when both parties are blotto, it’s hard to judge ‘who’s raping who’. His and the girls’ contributions appear to be retrospective rather than instant reactions, conveyed to Schwartzman in interviews presumably conducted several years after the events in question. That these are considered views makes them all the more startling.
Nancy Schwartzman tells her ramifying tale clearly and calmly, using a combination of talking heads, police interview recordings, TV news film and on-screen reiteration of the text exchanges. Her numerous interviewees include J P Rigaud, the chief detective in the case; Rachel Dissell, a journalist at The Plain Dealer, the major newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio; and true-crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, whose efforts first triggered controversy (Cody Saltsman’s parents sued her) and wider public interest in the case. By early 2013, the Steubenville High School crimes had given rise to public demonstrations in which women of various ages and backgrounds came out as rape victims. In the closing stages of the film, Goddard discloses that she’s one of their number – that she was sexually assaulted (it’s not clear when) by her then boyfriend’s brother. Alexandria Goddard would be a key figure in the story, almost its moral conscience, without this personal testimony. Yet it somehow puts the seal on the dismaying narrative of Roll Red Roll.
5 July 2020
