30 January, 2012

Tyler Clementi’s Suicide and Dharun Ravi’s Trial : The New Yorker

Tyler Clementi’s Suicide and Dharun Ravi’s Trial : The New Yorker: According to Wei, she and Ravi “saw Tyler and his friend, or whoever that was—their upper body.” She remembered that the two men were fully dressed, standing against the door. (Ravi later said that they had their shirts off.) “I couldn’t see any faces, and they were just what seemed to be kissing, and then, after literally two seconds, we just turned it off. And we were kind of both kind of in shock, because for me, anyway, I’ve never seen anything like that.” Ravi told police, “I just felt, like, really, like, really uncomfortable and, like, almost guilty that I saw it.” Wei recalled, “At first, we were both, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we can’t tell anybody about this, we’re just going to pretend this never happened.’ ”

Ravi’s resolve not to publicize the experience lasted for three or four minutes. At 9:17 P.M., he tweeted, “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.” Before Ravi locked down his Twitter account, a few days later, he had about a hundred and fifty followers, the bulk of them friends from high school. It’s possible that he still thought of his Twitter audience as a group no larger than those followers.