A Peabody Award-nominated documentary film director and producer recounts the 2012 rape of a 16-year-old girl by the Steubenville, Ohio high school football team, offering a broader understanding of rape culture, weaving memory and new testimony from a decades research into the event and town. 27,500 first printing.
A documentary film director and producer recounts the 2012 rape of a sixteen-year-old girl by several members of the Steubenville, Ohio, high school football team, offering a broader understanding of rape culture, weaving memory and new testimony from a decade's research into the event and town.
**A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection**
An incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change.
In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old girl was repeatedly assaulted by members of the Big Red high school football team. They took turns documenting the crime and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The victim, Jane Doe, learned the details via social media at a time when teens didnt yet understand the lasting trail of their digital breadcrumbs. Crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, along with hacker collective Anonymous, exposed the photos, Tweets, and videos, making this the first rape case ever to go viral and catapulting Steubenville onto the national stage.
Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman spent four years embedded in the town, documenting the case and its reverberations. Ten years after the assault, Roll Red Roll is the culmination of that research, weaving in new interviews and personal reflections to take readers beyond Steubenville to examine rape culture in everything from sports to teen dynamics. Roll Red Roll explores the factors that normalize sexual assault in our communities. Through inter-views with sportswriter David Zirin, victims rights attorney Gloria Allred and more, Schwartzman untangles the societal norms in which we too often sacrifice our daughters to protect our sons. With the Steubenville case as a flashpoint that helped spark the #MeToo movement, a decade later, Roll Red Roll focuses on the perpetrators and asks, can our society truly change?
A thoughtfully reported narrative about a rape case at the center of a deeply polarized steel town in the American Midwest, exploring what creates a culture where sexual violence is tacitly understood and condoned, and how to make a difference.On a summer night in 2012, a sixteen year-old girl incapacitated by alcohol was repeatedly assaulted by Steubenville, Ohio high school football stars, all of it documented on Twitter, YouTube, and through text and voice messages. Like everyone else in Steubenville, Jane Doe learned of the crimes committed on her body via social media. Many of the photos and videos from that night were deleted, but not before being captured and shared by a crime blogger, after which they went viral—putting Steubenville on the national stage.
In
Roll Red Roll, Nancy Schwartzman offers a broader understanding of rape culture, weaving memory and new testimony from a decade's research into the event and town, taking readers beyond Steubenville to look at America as a whole. For readers of Jon Krakauer's
Missoula and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s
She Said,Roll Red Roll unpacks the factors that create communities which engender systemic disdain for women and normalize sexual assault. Schwartzman proposes ways to unlearn the norms of a society that too often sacrifices its daughters for the sake of protecting its sons.
