After Ohio University celebrated its annual homecoming parade Oct. 12, videos and pictures began to circulate online of two people publicly engaging in oral sex during the night’s festivities. A full account of the incident was given by Athens County Prosecutor Keller Blackburn in the form of a press release published on Oct. 28 in which Blackburn described how the female and male had met at a bar, had drinks and then left around 2:30 a.m.
They walked together down Court Street, which was where the parade took place, kissing along the way. At one point they were shooed away after they were spotted making out against a car. Things began to escalate quickly between the pair, and the two engaged in oral sex against the exterior of a bank building on Court Street.
Soon, a crowd began to form around them, and that is when the camera phones came out. The following morning, the female shown in the video came forward to the authorities and accused the male in the video of rape after her roommate showed her the videos and pictures that were posted online. Though the charges have been dropped, this incident has sparked up further conversation about difference between consensual sex and rape in situations where alcohol is involved.
The video, which was posted on Twitter, has been since taken down, but law and court officials have taken notes on the evidence given and presented it to the public. In the report published in The Dispatch, Blackburn explained that when people who were passing by stopped to watch and videotape the incident, the boy in the video asked the girl if he wanted her to stop. She said “no,” so he continued.
Furthermore, there was no trace of any type of date rape drug found on the victim, and in the video, the female is seen smiling and even pulling the male’s head closer to her, according to the report released by Blackburn. It is clear that the act was consensual and the only thing that any of those two were guilty of that night was picking an awful public location to hook up with each other.
Rape is a serious accusation that can destroy a person’s reputation whether the accusation is valid or not. The fact that the female in the video went to the police after she became aware of the videos of her posted online tells me that she cried rape in an attempt to save herself from further embarrassment. The young man in the video could have gone to jail for something he did not do all because of a drunken mistake both parties made that night.
Chantalle Blundell, a sophomore at UT majoring in business management and entrepreneurship, gave her take on the incident from the perspective of a female college student.
“I would feel extremely humiliated,” Blundell said. “I think it was disrespectful of the people passing by to film it and take pictures… The girl and guy were obviously extremely intoxicated, and although it was public indecency, I feel like the people passing by should have been the bigger person and alert authorities to put an end to it.”
Because authorities had not released the names of the people in the video, 4chan users decided to take matters into their own hands and identify the female in the video and release her personal information to the public according to The Inquisitr. They ended up misidentifying the female from the video as Ohio University student Rachel Cassidy.
Cassidy reacted to the incident in an interview with Ohio University’s campus newspaper, The Post.
“My friend called me and said there were pictures posted of me linked to the woman in the video saying I was her, although that’s untrue,” Cassidy said. “I was nowhere near where the incident occurred. I have no idea why I was targeted.”
The threats Cassidy received were so bad that her parents had to request school administration to take down her information from the OU website, according to The Post. After receiving threats and being cyber bullied online, Cassidy was left with no choice but to deactivate all of her social media accounts.
This story would not have spread throughout the news as much as it did had it not been for the amount of videos and pictures that were tied to it. We live in a society in which we are constantly being watched. Whether it’s in the form of a security camera or through the lens of a person’s iPhone, it should be obvious that our behavior in public can be recorded in multiple ways.
With social media sites with video sharing capabilities being so popular, uploaded videos have the potential to go “viral” and pull in thousands or even millions of views in a matter of days. Viral videos are usually something shocking or funny and serve as a quick and easy form of entertainment. Vine and Instagram videos also allow amateur filmmakers to post their videos and share it to their friends and even the public, depending on their privacy settings. The people walking down the Ohio University homecoming parade route that night most likely found this public sexual act to be something so shocking that it was worthy of being recorded and spread throughout social media.
In regards to the people who documented the incident, I don’t find that they were wrong in doing this because of the embarrassment that was brought on to the couple in the video. If you’re going to get that highly intoxicated and act like a fool on the streets in front of everyone, then you have to be aware of the repercussions and accept them. However, it was wrong that people misidentified the student and an innocent woman was cyber bullied and threatened.
The biggest thing to take from this incident is that we must always be aware of our surroundings and understand that with a couple taps on an iPhone screen. Anything embarrassing or perhaps criminalizing can be documented and shared. Following the decision of Athens grand jury to drop the case, Blackburn left the public with a bit of advice to prevent incidents like this from ever happening again in her press release.
“Every decision we make now has the potential to be placed on Twitter, Facebook, commented on, shared and embellished, making life today more public than ever before. If a lesson exists from this case, let it be that we should behave as if our family is always watching,” Blackburn said.
Vanessa Righeimer can be reached at vanessa.righeimer@spartans.ut.edu
