STEUBENVILLE, Ohio | DMN — A judge announced on Sunday that the defendants in the Steubenville rape trial were found guilty. Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond had been accused of sexually assaulting a female acquaintance while she was severely intoxicated. Video and photo footage from the night of the incident spread across the internet soon after, drawing national attention to the case. Mays and Richmond, both football players at Steubenville High School, received delinquent verdicts on all three charges. Delinquent is the guilty equivalent for juveniles. They were both convicted of digitally penetrating the West Virginia girl, and Mays was also found guilty of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material. The boys will serve their sentence at a juvenile detention facility until they turn 21. The defendants and their family members openly wept at the verdict.
Judge Tom Lipps sentenced both to terms in youth prison. In an impassioned address prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter described the accuser as ‘the perfect victim.’ She said: ‘This isn’t a case about anything other than a very, very vulnerable girl.’ ‘This case isn’t about a Youtube video. It isn’t about social media. It isn’t about Big Red [the local football team of which both defendants are members].’ ‘This is about a 16-year-old girl who was taken advantage of and treated like a toy and it’s time that the people who did that to her are held accountable. The things that made her an imperfect witness, she couldn’t remember, made her the perfect victim.’ The prosecution has never hinged on ‘consent or force’ Ms Hemmeter said but on proving ‘substantial intoxication,’ something she claimed they had done beyond all doubt. ‘They’re there when she’s stumbling and puking, they’re carrying her like a rag doll, they’re stepping on her hair. Substantial intoxication – that’s what made her the victim because without that NONE of this goes down.’
Earlier the alleged victim broke down and wept as she was shown a picture of herself – naked, on her stomach, on the floor of the basement of a house which to this day she claims not to remember. The unidentified girl made an emotional appearance at the small town courthouse this afternoon. She spoke of the shame and fear of awaking naked in a strange house the next day and spoke of how Mays pressurized her to not press charges.
She said: ‘I was scared and embarrassed and it freaked me out. I woke up with no clothes on and I didn’t know what had happened at all. I was on a couch. My clothes were off. My hair was a mess and it felt weird. ‘They were all surrounding me, just talking, Trent, Ma’lik…’ She went on: ‘I asked where my clothes were and they put them on a table next to me. I kind of covered myself with a blanket and got dressed.’ ‘They told me I was a hassle but they had looked after me and put me to bed.’ The pair are charged with digitally penetrating the accuser, first in a car and then in the basement of a house, while out partying August 12. She said that ‘getting in trouble’ with her parents was the last thing on her mind when she admitted that same morning to her mother that she had no memory of the previous night.
As rumors swirled she asked Mays what had happened because, she said, ‘I thought I could trust him.’ It was only the following day when she was forwarded a video of a fellow student joking about her ‘being raped’ that the real horror began to dawn. ‘A bunch of people were telling me different things but when I saw the You Tube video I knew everyone who was telling me that they were taking care of me – it wasn’t true.’ On the advice of a nurse she chose not to do a rape kit when on the evening of August 13 she went to hospital. Earlier that day she had texted Mays in anger having seen the video saying: ‘Okay tell me right now what happened.’ Mays persistently told her he looked after her claiming latterly that ‘she had given him a handjob’. He claimed they had spoken and that she had been fine.
At 3.54 pm he texted: ‘Just let everyone know what happened like everyone said we raped you and that clearly is not what happened. Please get your dad to text.’ ‘Why am I hearing you are pressing charges?’ Throughout the day Mays sent increasingly hectoring texts: ‘Where are you? ‘Why are you going to press charges about something that never happened?’ ‘This is the most pointless thing that I’m going to get in trouble for something I should be getting thanked for taking care of you.’ Earlier in the day witnesses for the defense said the girl was ‘all over’ Ma’Lik Richmond hours before the alleged assault took place and was ‘interested’ in Mays.
The 17-year-old female witness said: ‘She was leaning up against Ma’lik’s right arm, Playfully talking and flirting with him … She was just all over him.’ In an emotionally charged courtroom, prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter read texts sent between the ‘victim’ and her accuser at a time when she was unaware that he was in any way involved in what had taken place. She went onto describe the 16-year-old’s behavior as ‘not out of character’ when drunk and admitted that she had seen her friend extremely intoxicated many times. The girl from nearby Weirton, West Virginia, is a classmate of the ‘victim’ and had considered her a best friend from the age of three. But she said they no longer talked because: ‘My mother felt we were going down the wrong path.’
The defense has repeatedly attempted to undercut the ‘victim’s ‘credibility. Her former close friend, admitted that when the ‘victim’ told her two days after the night of the parties that she had been drugged she did not believe her. Asked why, she said ‘Because she lies about a lot of things.’ Earlier today the defense also sought to undermine the extent to which her intoxication on the night prevented her from making her own choices. Prof Kim Fromme, a Professor of Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas, was called upon to estimate the blood alcohol level of the ‘victim’ based on reviewing the case. She stated: ‘Based on the reports and I had and my ability to estimate the blood alcohol level she achieved would not induce a pass out.’ She made the clear distinction between passing out – when the brain shuts down and consciousness is lost – and alcohol induced blackout, where the subject may appear drunk but can still function, often at a high level, but simply has no memory of their behaviors after the fact. ‘Alcohol interferes with the transfer of short term memory to long term,’ she explained. ‘An en bloc blackout means the memories are never encoded and cannot be retrieved. A fragmented blackout means they can be retrieved with the right cues and reminders.’ She stated that she believed the ‘victim’s’ behavior to be consistent with an en bloc blackout adding that she would have needed 11 shots to reach a blood alcohol level high enough to pass out.
