The Onion Predicted CNN’s Rape Apologist Steubenville Coverage Back In 2011 Satire
For anyone who missed it over the weekend, Steubenville football players Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16, were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl back in August and bragging about it on social media. Because their small town’s hero worship bred at least two people who felt it’s their God given right to revoke someone’s agency over their own body.
The judge declared the boys guilty on Sunday, at which time the boys feigned self-interested, cloying non-apologies that mostly missed the point that rape is bad and obfuscated that posting pictures of your crimes on social media is also bad. The judge let it slide and made the same point while the town full of enablers and rape apologists, the same people whose children watched and recorded the multiple attacks, ameliorated the crime as a “mistake” that shouldn’t “ruin their lives.” CNN took the same tack, insisting the case “ruined the boys’ lives” as one of them sobbed “my life is over, no one is going to want me now.” Neither the offenders nor CNN cared to mention the girl, whose case only received attention when the obvious cover up caught the attention of Anonymous and whose life is actually ruined.
CNN’s Poppy Harlow (who along with her employer has been receiving hate mail online all day) told anchor Candy Crowley, it’s ”Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart…” Considering their futures involved going through life as entitled, remorseless sociopaths… really?
The boys got a slap on the wrist rather than being tried as adults, facing being “jailed a minimum of one year, and fac[ing] a possible sentence of juvenile jail until they turn 21.” In addition, it appears the charges cannot be expunged and they’ll have to be on the sex offender register.
Crowley asked Paul Callan, a legal expert, to elucidate, ”The most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law…That will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Employers, when looking up their background, will see that they’re registered sex offenders. When they move into a new neighborhood and somebody goes on the Internet, where these things are posted, neighbors will know that they are registered sex offenders.” Because the register is best left to people who are caught urinating in bushes in public?
And, in a not uncharacteristic moment of prescience from “SportsDome which aired on Comedy Central in 2011,” here’s The Onion’s take on this kind of cloying rape apology.
There’s a Change.org petition asking CNN to apologise for its appalling non-coverage. Also, Jezebel.com has a great piece on victim blaming and myopic reactions to this weekend’s verdict.