Dharun Ravi, Gay Basher, Gets Bashed by Court

Dharun Ravi, the Rutgers student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate Tyler Clementi making out with a dude before Tyler killed himself, just got found guilty of a bunch of charges, including “bias intimidation based on sexual orientation,” which is a hate crime in New Jersey and can carry a sentence of up to ten years in prison. Depending on which news stories you’ve read, you might be cheered by this—maybe you think Dharun is an asshole, a homophobe, and a cruel prankster who tweeted open invitations to watch Tyler make out with his older boyfriend/fuckbuddy/whatever and helped drive a confused kid to suicide. Or you could look at Dharun and see a second confused kid, a guy who isn’t old enough to drink but might get tossed in a box for years (sentencing isn’t until May 21) for something dumb he did when he was 19. Damn. One young man died in a tragic way, and now our legal system has made sure that another young man’s life is completely fucked.

First of all: Dharun is probably an asshole, or at least he acted like one. This exhaustive New Yorker article on him describes a kid from New Jersey who was cocky, prone to lying, and pretty uncomfortable sharing a room with a gay guy—all pretty run-of-the-mill. The homophobic stuff he said online was more confused than actively hateful, the stuff that runs through nervous straight men’s minds when they haven’t actually met a gay man but are worried they’ll try to fuck them. Using a webcam to spy on Tyler making out with his special friend was mean, but he didn’t watch for long and didn’t record it (that was widely misreported at one point); calling it a “hate crime” seems excessive considering way more invasive bullying happens in Revenge of the Nerds.

The first couple years of college are when a lot of people learn how to become human: how to detach from their parents, how to have an identity not defined by rigid school schedules and curfews, how to talk to people who aren’t just like you. Tyler and Dharun were both in the process of doing this when Tyler died. Neither knew how to act around each other, and both did things that were probably not 100 percent cool—Tyler was bringing an older dude to his dorm room to hook up with him, and Dharun spied on him. Dharun’s shitty behavior only counts as a “crime” because Tyler killed himself—we’ll never know why, exactly, but that New Yorker article suggests it probably wasn’t because of Dharun—but because it does count as a crime the law got involved, and when the law gets involved, bad stuff happens.

Our legal system works through checks and balances and labyrinthine regulations, not common sense, so by the time Dharun was courtside, there was no way anyone in authority could say, “You know what? He’s technically guilty of 'intimidation,' and he’s also technically guilty of 'evidence tampering' because he deleted some tweets, but really he’s just a scared kid who hides his fear by doing jerkish things. Let’s give him some community service and hope he becomes less of a jerk.” The trial didn’t even turn on the question of how bad the stuff Dharun actually did was; the narrow legal questions that decided Dharun’s fate basically boiled down to: Did he spy on his roommate because he was gay? Since that answer was obviously yes, the court basically had no choice but to convict him.

What’s helped by Dharun being behind bars for years? Is he a dangerous criminal? Is he a threat to serially bully gay people? Is the crime of spying on someone and being an asshole so heinous our society needs to crack down on offenders? Or did Dharun get caught up in the system thanks to a death he didn’t cause, then get ground between the gears?

@HCheadle