Roll Red Roll opens on a quiet street. The moon looms over several middle class homes, a couple of front porches, a single street lamp. It could be last week; it could be 10 years ago. “That girl,” a guy says in dubbed audio. “What did they do to that girl?”
Laughter, grainy from a cell phone recording. “She is so raped right now.” More laughter. “Dead body.”
And then it’s dawn, and morning fog hugs the hills of Steubenville, Ohio. A text from Jane Doe flits across the screen: “OMG please tell me this isn’t true.”
“There’s a complicated story to tell, or there’s a simple story to tell,” says director Nancy Schwartzman of her documentary that examines the heavily covered Steubenville rape case from seven years ago. The simple story would be this: on the morning of 12 August 2012, a 16-year-old girl woke up in an unfamiliar basement in Steubenville, a football-obsessed town on the border of West Virginia. Her phone and underwear are missing, and she can’t remember the party from the night before. Knowledge of her assault, explicit video and photos, traveled by text and tweet. Two high school football stars – quarterback Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richardson – were arrested, and investigators prepared their case. But in a distinctly late 2012 move, an amateur crime blogger, fed up with community inaction, republished several of the boys’ damning social media posts (“I have no sympathy for whores,” one night-of tweet said). The hacker group Anonymous called for vigilante justice and posted the video heard in the first scene, taken by the boys that night.
National media descended on Steubenville, which reckoned publicly and contentiously with the unspoken assumption, posed by Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Rachel Dissell, “Is this football town putting its daughters at risk to protect its sons?” Mays and Richardson were both found guilty in March 2013. (Richardson was released after a year served in juvenile detention, Mays after two).
The more complicated story – the one Schwartzman chillingly assembles in Roll Red Roll through tweets, police interviews, radio broadcasts and over four years traveling in and out of Steubenville – would be those protected sons, and the shards of rape culture the case exposed: the football brotherhood, a police interviewer berating a player with “man up!” Trent Mays texting Jane Doe, asking about the police investigation: “Are u gonna do everything u can for me?” The reams of texted rape jokes, “dead body” references, “we’re hittin it for real.” A blurry photo of a passed-out girl, boys carrying her by her limbs, posted to Instagram the night of the party and captioned: “sloppy.” A local sports radio host declaring that, given his knowledge of the football team, Jane Doe likely just didn’t want to admit to her parents that she had sex. The lead police investigator, JP Rigaud, explaining the legal definition of rape to the head football coach in an interview. Threatened football suspensions for underage drinking, but not for substantiated allegations of sexual assault. “I don’t condone what the boys did” qualified with a but and judgements of Jane Doe’s decisions.
“As a film-maker, I wanted to tell the complicated story and show the layers not just of the kids but of the adults,” said Schwartzman. “Where are young people getting socialized, and how? What are the factors? What’s playing on the radio? How are people talking about this? How are they talking about this on social media, text message? I wanted to show all of those gradations of the culture.”
Many of the most shocking gradations were already online, in some form, publicized as evidence in both the criminal and social media trials, when Steubenville became a national shorthand for long-simmering frustrations with “boys will be boys” over the safety of girls. This is in large part thanks to Alexandria Goddard, the Columbus crime blogger, who appears in Roll Red Roll as the preeminent voice against Steubenville’s blind eye. Goddard first stumbled across the story in a three-sentence local news brief – two football players arrested – a couple weeks after the assault. “I knew from living there that the town was probably going nuts because it involved football players,” she says by phone. “I realized something is not being told here. There has to be more to this than what the media has posted.”
It was a crime ripe to bury, so she dug into the football rosters’ social media history, screen-grabbing their horrific and telling tweets, Facebook statuses and Instagram photos. “I wanted to know about the people peripheral to those who committed the crime,” she says. “Who were they? Where did they come from? What was their life like?”
Between the social media posts and message board for Steubenville parents and football fans, “I was just shocked that what happened was really that horrible, and that people were really ok with laughing about it,” she says. So she gathered the evidence, and pressed publish.
Schwartzman recasts much of Goddard’s work as pieces of evidence in what becomes, for the first half of the movie, a suspenseful crime drama sorting through the discrepancies between texts and police interview footage. “How they’re talking in a text message is so different than how they’re talking in a police interview,” says Schwartzman. “I wanted to be able to compare that and tie it to Alex’s blog and all that she was discovering.”
The police interviews were particularly important, she says, “to be able to craft character profiles of each kid, and everyone that we had a case interview with.” No one directly involved in the crime, especially Mays or Richardson, agreed to participate, “so really all I had to work with was text messages and police interviews.”
The only person Schwartzman deliberately de-centered was Jane Doe, who has never spoken publicly. Besides a few texts, she’s barely a presence in the film, though it’s an erasure of deep respect. Roll Red Roll is “a film about rape that doesn’t burden or center the victim, that actually shifts the focus on the behavior, on the boys, on the witnesses, on the periphery,” says Schwartzman.
So often, she explained, films about rape revolve around the victim. “And what are we going to learn about rape culture unless we are looking at who’s doing it?” Remove rape culture’s knee-jerk center of scrutiny – the victim – and the context becomes clearer. The point is not Jane Doe, says Schwartzman. It’s “who’s doing it? And what are these male-to-male allegiances? And what’s the language being used, and where can young men see themselves in the story?”
“I think we can no longer deny that rape is an epidemic in the United States,” said Schwartzman of the time elapsed since Jane Doe’s assault. Given recent national events – the election of Donald Trump, the Kavanaugh hearings – she’s observed a “general level of fed-up-ness with bro culture and toxic masculinity … I’m excited to see how many men are willing to engage [with the film]. I don’t think that would’ve been the case five years ago, frankly.”
Roll Red Roll turns the scrutiny usually reserved for the victim to the taunting text messages, the “how does a dead body feel” riffs, the immediate first concern over the boys’ futures – the cruelty of male bonding, the jokes about and abuse of a woman’s body in an endless game to impress other men that is not unique to Steubenville.
“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” said Christine Blasey Ford, during Congressional testimony last year, on the strongest memory from her assault. The Anonymous-leaked video of the boys joking about Jane Doe the night of her assault is 12 and a half minutes long. They’re laughing the whole time.
