On the day after two high school football players from Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of rape, Alexandria Goddard, a crime blogger whose early and dogged research helped bring national attention to the case, is still fending off criticism that she helped create “an Internet lynch mob.â€
“I am just the messenger here,†said Ms. Goddard, 45, who once lived in Steubenville and began ollowing the case closely after she read what was being said online about the 16-year-old victim after the arrest of the football players on Aug. 22.
Her expertise creating social media profiles of teenagers whose parents want to know what their children are doing online gave her a distinctive window on the situation. She applied her social media sleuthing skills to the online conversation about the victim and the events leading up to and around the Aug. 11 party.
“Within about two hours, I had a pretty decent outline of what was going on that night,†Ms. Goddard said, after finding the names of the high school football team members on a school Web site and then discovering their public Twitter streams.
“I was sickened,†she said in an interview on Monday. “It was amazing the stuff that was out there and that so many people who saw what was going on recorded it in real time and yet not one person stopped it.â! €
After the verdict on Sunday, the Ohio attorney general, Michael DeWine, said that he planned to convene a grand jury to investigate whether others should be charged in the case. At least 16 people refused to talk to investigators about the case, which has deeply divided a town with a long tradition of supporting its high school football team and players.
Concerned that the popularity of the football program could influence an outcome in the case, and hearing frustration from residents and law enforcement officers over the lack of cooperation from witnesses, Ms. Goddard wrote about her findings on her blog, Prinniefied
She also grabbed screenshots of images and posts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube before many of them were deleted. She said she sent them to a Steubenville police officer she knew from the time she lived there but never heard back from him.
Realizing that not everyone knew how to find the posts on Twitter, she said she also posted some screenshots of what football players at the parties had said about the victim.
“It was one thing for people in the ! town to h! ear about what was being said and another thing for them to be able to see it,†she said.
Among the images Ms. Goddard found was a photo on Instagram of two boys carrying the girl, while unclothed, which she did not post for months. She also found a Google cache of a video that had been posted online and then deleted.
On Aug. 26, she wrote on her blog:
I have been reading tweets and posts online for the past few days and I can tell you that I am DISGUSTED. TRULY and UTTERLY DISGUSTED at the things being posted by those who were in attendance of this brutal attack or the posts by their girlfriends who are disparaging the victim’s reputation. I am disgusted with the students who are protecting their friends and tweeting “Oh, ______ better not get in trouble for this.“ Tweet after tweet has been filled with support for the boys who were arrested, as well s vowing their support and willingness to stick together because they are “#StuebenvilleStarsForeverâ€. No, you are not stars. You are criminals who are walking around right now on borrowed time.
“Then after the first blog post, people were hungry for information,†she said. “Local media wasn’t providing it. I kept going back.â€
The outrage expressed in some of posts on the blog, with comments naming individuals at the party, deeply concerned many people in the community, which was already divided by the case. She said several old friends from Steubenville turned their backs on her. The mother of an old friend said publicly that she hoped Ms. Goddard would get AIDS.
Ms. Goddard said she was hurt and deeply disappointed by the lack of support, but others online, including the blogger Michelle McKee, jumped in to help keep on top of the case.
In October, the family of one of the Steubenville High school stu! dents, wh! o had posted images from that night on Twitter, threatened Ms. Goddard with a lawsuit against her and the blog, and anonymous commenters on her blog. The suit was dropped in December. After the the lawsuit was dropped, the young man issued a statement, which Ms. Goddard posted:
I deeply regret my actions on the night of August 11, 2012. While I wasn’t at the home where the alleged assault took place, there is no doubt that I was wrong to post that picture from an earlier party and tweet those awful comments. Not a moment goes by that I don’t wish I would have never posted that picture or tweeted those comments. I want to sincerely apologize to the victim and her family for these actions. I also want to acknowledge the work of several bloggers, especially Ms. Goddard at Prinniefied.com, in their efforts to make sure the full truth about that terrible night eventually comes out. At no time did my family mean to stop anyone from expresing themselves online - we only wanted to correct what we believed were misstatements that appeared on Ms. Goddard’s blog. I am glad that we have resolved our differences with Ms. Goddard and that she and her contributors can continue their work.†- Cody Saltsman
After a detailed account in The New York Times by Juliet Macur and Nate Schweber about the divided town and the role of social media in the case, Ms. Goddard was no longer part of a small cadre of online bloggers and Twitter users following developments.
People claiming to be associated with the hacking collective Anonymous soon began stirring up trouble in Steubenville, taking credit for bringing down the city’s Web site and hacking into Web pages for the football program. As The Atlantic reported earlier this year, images, transcripts and e-mails that people had previously thought were private were posted online.
Among the items uploaded on YouTube was a 12 1/2-minute video of a Steubenville high school graduate who had gone to Ohio State University at an Aug. 11 party, laughing and joking about the victim, and talking about rape. It now has more than one million views.
Ohio State University received so many complaints about the Steubenville high school graduate speaking in the video that the university issued a statement in January that he would not be returning as a student that semester.
Ms. Goddard said she had not tried to contact the victim during her reporting because she did not think it was appropriate.
“I hope to talk to her one day,†shesaid. “She is very courageous. A lot of rape victims don’t ever want to get on that stand and face their attackers. To be 16 years old, and to get on the stand, takes a lot of courage. She is a very brave young girl. She has empowered a lot of other women to tell their stories now.â€
