Roll Red Roll
Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
**A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection**
An incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change.
In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old girl was repeatedly assaulted by members of the “Big Red” high school football team. They took turns documenting the crime and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The victim, Jane Doe, learned the details via social media at a time when teens didn’t yet understand the lasting trail of their digital breadcrumbs. Crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, along with hacker collective Anonymous, exposed the photos, Tweets, and videos, making this the first rape case ever to go viral and catapulting Steubenville onto the national stage.
Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman spent four years embedded in the town, documenting the case and its reverberations. Ten years after the assault, Roll Red Roll is the culmination of that research, weaving in new interviews and personal reflections to take readers beyond Steubenville to examine rape culture in everything from sports to teen dynamics. Roll Red Roll explores the factors that normalize sexual assault in our communities. Through inter-views with sportswriter David Zirin, victim’s rights attorney Gloria Allred and more, Schwartzman untangles the societal norms in which we too often sacrifice our daughters to protect our sons. With the Steubenville case as a flashpoint that helped spark the #MeToo movement, a decade later, Roll Red Roll focuses on the perpetrators and asks, can our society truly change?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker Schwartzman's debut, a follow-up to her 2019 documentary Roll Red Roll, is a searing account of the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case and its aftermath. In 2012, a 16-year-old girl was assaulted by members of the town's high school football team, and pictures, descriptions, and jokes about the crime went viral as the teens posted to Twitter and Facebook. The girl, who was drunk and possibly drugged, and her family only learned of it via social media. Parents and school officials closed ranks to delete texts and posts in an effort to impede the investigation. But true-crime blogger Alexandria Goddard and vigilante hacker group Anonymous posted everything they dug up online, and the Steubenville case became notorious as the first rape case in the U.S. widely documented with images on the internet. Two team members were convicted in juvenile court and sentenced to one and two years for the attack, but the culpable adults were never convicted of obstruction or collusion, and the author concludes the town's boys will be boys mentality remains the same today. Schwartzman's sense of outrage fuels the narrative, but never overwhelms it. This tragic cautionary tale deserves a wide audience.