Ravi was called a tormenter and a murderer. It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.
But last spring, shortly before Molly Wei made a deal with prosecutors, Ravi was indicted on charges of invasion of privacy sex crimes , bias intimidation hate crimes , witness tampering, and evidence tampering. Bias intimidation is a sentence-booster that attaches itself to an underlying crime—usually, a violent one.
Ravi had made four court appearances since his indictment. The man, known in the public record as M. Ravi was visibly anxious when the judge addressed him. Last May, Berman reminded him, he had rejected a plea offer made by McClure. If Ravi accepted the plea offer, he would serve no more than five years. Berman asked Ravi if he understood. Ravi said yes, in an unexpectedly high voice, and gave a reflexive smile.
He was not taking this deal. Berman set a trial date of February 21st. The Clementis waited for Ravi and his father to leave, then walked out, hand in hand. On a Saturday night in August, , a week before starting college, Dharun Ravi decided to look online for his future Rutgers roommate.
He was living with his parents in Plainsboro. Ravi, who was planning to major in math and economics, had learned that he had been assigned to Davidson Hall—a collection of single-story, barracks-like dorms on Busch campus, which is considered the dullest of the four Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick and neighboring Piscataway. He would be in Davidson Hall C, a coed dorm for about eighty students. A little before midnight, Ravi began an I. This guy is retarded. Nobody had replied.
Ravi and Tam also found questions about anti-virus software and contributions to a Web site of counter-revolutionary peevishness called Anythingbutipod. In these old posts, at least, Keybowvio—who was indeed Tyler Clementi—seemed worried or defensive about computing. Ravi sent Tam a link to a page that contained sex-tinged ads but was otherwise mundane.
At six minutes past midnight, Tam offered Ravi a summary. Picone, who was about to start at Rutgers, and who described himself as gay. He was good-looking, with long wavy hair sometimes held in place with a headband; video clips indicated that he was a talented singer. Tam remembered that Ravi had met a gay student named Carter during orientation at Rutgers, and had since spoken of him admiringly.
My dad is going to throw him out the window. In witness statements taken for the Clementi case, nobody has recalled Ravi being contemptuous of gay people. His Twitter account— Dharun—was public and easy to find. Tyler Clementi read that first tweet about himself before he started at Rutgers. Ravi sent Tyler Picone a message, via Facebook. Picone wrote back, explaining that he was the wrong Tyler. The same day, Ravi finally heard from Clementi, by e-mail. Picone, who grew up in nearby South River, was charming and assured.
Picone imagined that, had he and Ravi become roommates, they might have become friends. But he acknowledged that to speak so generously of Ravi—to unsettle the portrait of him as the perpetrator of hate crimes—was unwelcome at Rutgers.
Once Ravi understood that he would be living with Clementi, not Picone, he felt that he knew these essential facts: his roommate was gay, profoundly uncool, and not well off. If the first attribute presented both a complication and a happy chance to gossip, the second and third were perceived as failings.
One evening not long ago, I visited Paul Mainardi, a lawyer with a professorial manner who lives in Philadelphia, in an apartment tower with a wide view of the Delaware River. Mainardi poured a whiskey. He has accompanied the Clementis to hearings, and issued occasional press statements.
The town, which is wealthy and white, was recently ranked fifteenth on a list of the top-earning towns in the country, one place below Greenwich, Connecticut. She noted the economic difference between the east and west sides of town. Jane Clementi is a nurse. Joseph Clementi runs the public-works department in the nearby town of Hawthorne. They have two older sons, both of whom returned home after finishing college.
Jane Clementi is active in the local Grace Church, which is affiliated with Willow Creek, the evangelical megachurch near Chicago. Mainardi described a quiet family. Tyler was the quietest of all. Very shy. In his mid-teens, he had the tastes and manners of a teen-ager from an earlier era. He contributed to online discussions about musicals and opera, gardening, and the care of African dwarf frogs.
Tyler was close to his mother. Sitting on a bus, he is staring at the camera; behind him, a girl is laughing and putting on lipstick. Soon after starting at Rutgers, Clementi had a late-night I. The friendship seems to have been fairly new. Clementi was, in fact, a very good violin player: he played in both the Bergen Youth Orchestra and the Ridgewood Symphony, an adult orchestra.
But he was uncertain if he had the talent or focus necessary for a career in music. By his senior year, Clementi had stopped considering a music degree. Online, he asked how to choose between Rutgers, Hartwick, and the University of Connecticut. I feel very defeated by HS and hated the whole thing.
It was quite impressive. If Clementi had a touch of middle-aged fastidiousness, Ravi was fully a teen-ager: rangy, physical, with a taste for public regard. By the fall of , when he left Plainsboro for Rutgers, he had written more than two thousand messages on Twitter, twice as many as the most active of his friends.
At the end of the questioning, Paone released Ravi saying, "the defendant has no further obligation to the state. The "state of New Jersey vs. Dharun Ravi" was over, six years' worth, just like that.
And with his parents and a lone friend, Ravi left the courthouse and walked onto the New Brunswick streets, determined to disappear into the crowd. Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno starledger.
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You are punished first for the crime you committed. Then you are punished for the accident of your birthplace. But we can probably be certain of one thing. Dharun Ravi surely never imagined that that webcam could become a one-way ticket to his own deportation. The Indian-American student who secretly filmed his roommate's gay liaison could get 10 years in prison in the case that has struck an anti-bullying nerve in America. Twenty-year-old Dharun Ravi is due to be released from the Middlesex County Jail today after serving 20 days of a day jail sentence.
Firstpost Conversations 9 Months S. World Dharun Ravi guilty of hate crimes against gay roommate The Indian-American student who secretly filmed his roommate's gay liaison could get 10 years in prison in the case that has struck an anti-bullying nerve in America.
World Dharun Ravi won't be deported to India Twenty-year-old Dharun Ravi is due to be released from the Middlesex County Jail today after serving 20 days of a day jail sentence. I'm a demon to them. In March, Ravi was found guilty of a bias crime for using a webcam to spy on Clementi. Clementi's father, Joseph Clementi, told the judge, "One of Tyler's last actions was to check Ravi's Twitter page" and noted that his son checked his roommate's Twitter page 37 times before leaving the Rutgers campus and driving to the George Washington Bridge where he jumped to his death.
Ravi was convicted of a hate crime for using a webcame to spy on Clementi during a sexual liaison with a man identified only as "MB" and announcing what he saw on Twitter.
Ravi put out another tweet when he heard Clementi was having a second date with MB. Joseph Clementi said that Ravi decided his son "wasn't deserving the respect of basic human decency" and "was below him" because Tyler Clementi was gay.
Clementi's mother Jane Clementi cried in the front row has her husband spoke. Tyler Clementi's mother Jane Clementi recalled the day she helped her "excited" son move into his Rutgers dorm room and the coldness Ravi showed by not getting up from his computer to say hello.
Jane Clementi said that though she initially thought Ravi may have been stressed or busy, she said she realized during trial that that was not the case. She heard during the trial that Ravi had not reached out to her son on Facebook or via email, but, rather, had used his computer skills to plug Clementi's email address into various computer programs to discover what websites he frequented and to discover that Tyler was gay.
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