“Anonymous” Hackers Find Names Of Attackers Who Gang-Raped Cheerleader 12 Years Ago
The question whether the members of the Anonymous collective are heroes or dangerous vigilantes has cropped up again in connection with the collective’s decision to publish a woman’s claim that, 12 years ago, she was the victim of a gang rape similar to the rape that took place in Steubenville, Ohio. Amanda Stevenson thought that, just as the Anonymous collective helped reveal the infamous Steubenville case, perhaps it could help her too. This case, though, is much more fraught because there’s no evidence, just Stevenson’s say-so, and the event she describes took place more than a decade ago.
According to Stevenson, after her boyfriend left, someone gave her a Mountain Dew. When she drank it, Stevenson says, she lost control of her limbs and could no longer talk. She was then locked in a room with five boys, three of whom raped her. In the morning, one of the boys drove her home. If her memory is correct, and this is indeed what happened, those five boys engaged in a heinous and grossly illegal act. That Stevenson was a fool does not excuse their crime.
Once home, Stevenson told her parents what had happened, and they took her to a hospital for a rape test. The hospital contacted the Hocking County Sheriff’s Department. At this point, Stevenson refused to identify her alleged attackers, claiming that she was too afraid and traumatized to do so. In other words, she made an allegation, but never followed through. Had she done so, she would have given the boys she accused the chance to defend themselves or have given the county in which she lived the opportunity to prosecute a fresh crime – complete with DNA evidence — and imprison dangerous young men.
When Stevenson returned to school, a rumor was going around that Stevenson had willingly engaged in group sex and had made up the rape story to avoid the “slut” label. The sheriff’s department did interview some students and then, coincidentally or not, someone threw a brick through the window of the Stevenson family car. The family eventually moved to Virginia and that was the end of the rape case in Ohio.
Except that it didn’t end in Stevenson’s mind. She continued to have flashbacks and feel emotionally traumatized by the event. Twelve years after the fact, Stevenson and her fiancé, Tim Tolka, decided to go after the alleged rapists.
They returned to Ohio but, unsurprisingly, the sheriff’s department had nothing to show for a rape charge that Stevenson had refused to press more than a decade before. The files, her clothes, and the rape test were gone. In other words, unlike the situation in Steubenville, where the boys who assaulted the drunken victim had taken photos and posted them on social media, and where the event had just recently occurred, there is no evidence whatsoever to corroborate Stevenson’s decade-plus-old story.
Undeterred by the complete lack of proof that something bad happened to her twelve years ago, Stevenson contacted a private Facebook page called “Operation Abuse Awareness” (“OAA”). OAA is an Anonymous-collective page that had its genesis in the Steubenville case, which Anonymous exposed. OAA claims that it exists to pursue bullies and sexual abusers.
Anonymous
Without hours, Tolka and Stevenson were chatting through Facebook with someone going by the screen name “Jonathan Perez.” Four days later, Perez, on his own initiative, posted Stevenson’s Facebook messages on his public website, with an announcement that “This is sick, and we are going after them.”
Once things like that get out on the internet, people sit up and pay attention. Word of Stevenson’s allegations very quickly got to Hocking County law enforcement. Detective Caleb Moritz contacted Perez, asking him if it was true that he possessed further information about an alleged sexual assault against Amanda Stevenson. Moritz told Perez that “I would like to speak to you, or the person with the new information, so that we might further investigate the case and bring the perpetrator(s) to justice.”
Although thrilled to have law enforcement taking her story seriously, Stevenson was less than excited by the fact that Perez had put everything out there on the internet. On her behalf, Tolka begged Perez to remove the information, but Perez didn’t. Eventually, he claimed to have forgotten his own password, so there the information remains, out in the public eye.
Moritz did talk to Stevenson, but he could only point out the obvious to her: with no evidence from a 12-year-old case, the only way to put together a meaningful prosecution would be for the alleged perpetrators to confess or for some new witness to come forward, neither of which was likely to happen.
The total absence of evidence didn’t stop the Anonymous collective. In March, a subgroup called AmeriSec held a rally for Stevenson in order to raise awareness of her claims. The Hocking County sheriff’s department was not amused. Moritz explained to Stevenson that “If one of the three would happen to stumble onto that page and read the information contained on it, they can use it to formulate a story and an alibi.”
Actual footage of the abuse heaped upon the Steubenville rape victim.
Stevenson claims that, twelve years on, she’s finally emotionally ready to confront what happened to her. She told Mother Jones that “You don’t want to accept that it happened, so it didn’t happen. It’s a hard thing to face. You are afraid of how it is going to define and change you.” Contrary to all appearances, she claims “I am more stable and can revisit it without it crippling me.”
As you’ve probably realized if you’ve read this far, I’m not sympathetic to Stevenson. There’s a reason that our American legal system has statues of limitations, putting a deadline on the time within which a case can be brought. Those accused of a crime should be able to clear their name quickly, or get convicted quickly, while the evidence and the memories of those involved are still fresh.
Stevenson had her chance twelve years ago – and chose not to take it. The fact that she was young and vulnerable then doesn’t mean that she gets to waltz into the public forum twelve years later, announce, “I’m all better now,” and launch accusations against men who might be guilty but who, if innocent, have no way to clear their names from these terrible accusations.
Right now, there are three – no, make that four — ways to view what happened twelve years ago, and none can be proven: (1) Stevenson may indeed have been drugged and raped, which is a terrible crime; (2) she may have gotten herself drunk and stoned, at which time neither she nor anyone else was coherent enough to know about consent; (3) she may willingly have participated in group sex, something she now regrets; or (3) Stevenson is a liar and nothing happened.
As I noted above, this case is completely different from Steuvenville, which happened recently and involved photographic evidence. This is also a different case from what happened to Rehtaeh Parsons, who hanged herself after pictures of her rape went viral in her school. What Anonymous did in this case, based on nothing more than the say-so of one women about events that alleged happened more than a decade ago, isn’t justice, it’s a travesty of justice.
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