No Sex Tape, No Outing in Tyler Clementi Case

One reason some people think
Dharun Ravi deserves
harsh punishment for spying on a college roommate who later
committed suicide is the persistent misconception that he made
video of Tyler Clementi's homosexual encounter publicly available.
A week after Clementi killed himself in September 2010, The New
York Times reported
that Ravi "used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the
roommate's intimate encounter live on the Internet." The story was
headlined "Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump." The New
York Daily News said Ravi
"spied on [Clementi's] gay tryst and streamed it live with a
webcam." ABC News
claimed Ravi "secretly filmed [Clementi] during a 'sexual
encounter' in his dorm room and posted it live on the Internet."
The headline: "Victim of Secret Dorm Sex Tape Posts Facebook
Goodbye, Jumps to His Death." Presumably based on such reports,
Ellen Degeneres declared
that Clementi "was outed as being gay on the Internet and he killed
himself."
But as
testimony during Ravi's trial has confirmed, there was no sex
tape, and the images were never available to the general public. On
the evening of September 19, 2010, Ravi set the webcam on his
computer to automatically accept video chats, then went across the
hall to a friend's room, where they saw a few seconds of Clementi
and his visitor kissing, fully clothed, before shutting off the
feed. The images were not recorded, and they were not transmitted
anywhere except across the hall. The New York
Times summary of the case, last updated on February 24,
nevertheless still
says Ravi "secretly used a webcam to stream Mr. Clementi's
romantic interlude with another man over the Internet."
Technically, I suppose that's true, in the sense that any video
chat is streamed over the Internet. But the implication?that Ravi
enabled the whole world to see what Clementi was doing in their
room?is false.
In his measured and illuminating New Yorker

article about the case, Ian Parker also notes that Clementi was
not trying to hide his sexual orientation, so it's hard to see how
Ravi could have outed him. Although Clementi was upset about his
roommate's spying, Parker writes, "there's little to support the
idea that he was mortified by the thought that he'd been outed." He
suggests "the enduring false belief that Ravi was responsible for
outing Tyler Clementi, and for putting a sex tape on the Internet,
can be seen as a collective effort to balance a terrible event with
a terrible cause."
Look for more about Ravi's prosecution in my column
tomorrow.

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