JUNE 4, 2015, 6:53 PM LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2015, 7:00 PM
BY ABBOTT KOLOFF
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Jane and Joseph Clementi of Ridgewood, whose son Tyler committed suicide almost five years ago after being bullied because of his sexual orientation, talked about their anti-bullying efforts and their enduring pain in an interview that is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday on CBS.
Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman, jumped from the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, 2010, after learning that his roommate had used a webcam to broadcast a romantic encounter with a man in their dorm room.
In response to a question by Erin Moriarty for the CBS News program “Sunday Morning,” Jane Clementi said family members are still living with the pain of Tyler’s death, and wondering what they might have done differently when he told them he was gay.
“Not even near healed,” Jane Clementi said, according to a press release issued by CBS. “I don’t know what ‘healed’ will be like. I don’t even know that there’s a word for healing. I think it’s learning to live through the pain.”
The interview with the Clementis is scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday at 9 a.m. Moriarty is a correspondent for the network’s “48 Hours” TV show.
The roommate, Dharun Ravi, did not “out” Tyler Clementi as gay.
Before starting school, Ravi used the internet to see if he could find information about his new roomate online. He easily found Clementi’s communications on the Just Us Boys website. So before Ravi and Clementi ever met at Rutgers, Ravi already knew that Clementi was exploring homosexuality.
Ravi, an Indian-born non-citizen, was facing possible deportation if convicted of the crimes he was accused of. His minority status was apparently not of the proper type for Rutgers, who blatantly hung him out to dry.
The following is from a British paper’s account of the court proceedings when Ravi was prosecuted:
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A man who identifies himself only as M.B., and who witnesses say was watched via webcam while kissing a Rutgers University student who later committed suicide, took the stand today, saying he noticed the webcam while the two were being intimate.
“‘I had just glanced over my shoulder and I noticed there was a webcam that was faced toward the direction of the bed,’ said the man, identified only by the initials M.B. ‘Just being in a compromising position and seeing a camera lens – it just stuck out to me.’
The man testified that he had met Tyler Clementi in August 2010 through a gay dating website.
They chatted online initially, he said, and their first in-person meeting was in Clementi’s dorm room on September 16 – three days before the alleged spying.
Clementi killed himself days later.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the man’s identity, there was an unusually large media contingent packed into the Middlesex County Courthouse for what was already a high-profile trial.
But in a little more than 30 minutes of direct-examination, not much light was shed on who he is.
His lawyer, Richard Pompelio of the New Jersey Crime Victims’ Law Centre, said he’s in his 20’s. He said he doesn’t believe he’s married and did not know whether he was out as a gay man.
‘He’s a fine young man who came here under horrible circumstances to tell the truth,’ Mr Pompelio said outside the courtroom during a break in testimony.
He said that M.B. had a fledgling relationship with Clementi and learned about his death from hearing it on the radio.
In court, M.B. himself said he lived about a 20-minute drive from Clementi’s dorm and was starting a new job on September 20, 2010.
He testified that he met Clementi in his dorm room three times. The first was on September 16, when he said Ravi was not expected home until the middle of the night.
He said he was careful to leave before Ravi was expected to return to the room. ‘I made sure to leave well before 2am as to not cause any conflict,’ he said.
The second was September 19, the date of the alleged spying – and the time he said he noticed the webcam.
He said he and Clementi were naked and had sex that night.
People who saw webcam images of his encounter with Clementi have testified that they saw no more than a few seconds of video and that the men were not seen doing anything more graphic than kissing.
At one point, some said, their shirts were off, but their pants were on.
The man told jurors there were about five students looking at him as he left the building on September 19.
‘Had they been in the street or somewhere other than this building I would have asked them why they were looking at me,’ he said. He called their actions ‘unsettling.’
During a tense cross-examination, Ravi’s defence lawyer, Steven Altman, repeatedly asked M.B. whether he wanted to meet Clementi for a movie or a cup of coffee – anywhere besides the dorm.
‘I preferred just to wait until we could have the privacy of a room, wherever that room might be,’ he said.
His home often would not work, he said.
The third time he met Clementi was two days later, when Ravi is charged with attempted invasion of privacy. There’s been testimony that the webcam feed did not work that night. According to court papers filed previously, it was unplugged.
M.B. testified that he heard comments from the courtyard outside the dorm that night that bothered him. But he was not allowed to say what it was.
He testified that he wanted to see Clementi again. ‘As far as whether I was going to return to that building to see him, I felt a little uneasy about it,’ he said.
M.B. went to great lengths to keep his identity private, as he is a victim of the alleged crime. He requested that only his hands were photographed, and did not walk through any of the court’s public hallways.
ABC News reported that M.B. wore a blue and white striped shirt, was clean-shaven, and had dark hair. The New York Post said the man was about ten years older than Clementi.
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Ravi’s conviction is subject to being overturned in trouble according to NJ.com, with the trial judge’s decisions to exclude evidence of how Clementi’s suicidal state of mind might have been due to reasons other than having been surreptitiously ‘livestreamed’ by his roommate, such as his mother’s displease reaction upon Clementi telling her he was gay:
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Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Sue Epstein | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com By Sue Epstein | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on March 18, 2015 at 11:50 AM, updated March 18, 2015 at 11:51 AM
NEW BRUNSWICK — The N.J. Supreme Court’s decision this week striking down a portion of the state’s bias crime statute could win Dharun Ravi a new trial in the Tyler Clementi webcam case, his attorney said.
The appeal of Ravi’s 2012 guilty verdict that included several bias intimidation charges is still ongoing, according to his attorney, Steven Altman of New Brunswick. But it now takes a different turn, he said.
The decision, released Tuesday, struck down the third section of the statute that focused on the victim’s state of mind and said it is the defendant’s intent and state of mind that is important, not the victim’s.
Altman said the decision directly strikes down one of Ravi’s convictions, which was based on that section. But it also brings into question decisions made by the trial judge, Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman, now retired. Berman permitted the prosecution to produce evidence of Tyler Clementi’s state of mind to the jury.
Clementi, who was Ravi’s dorm mate, jumped off the George Washington Bridge several days after the incidents in September 2010 in which Ravi set up a remote webcam that spied on Clementi while he was having an intimate encounter with another man.
However, Ravi was not charged in Clementi’s death and the defense maintained the webcam incidents had nothing to do with Clementi’s decision to commit suicide.
Berman would not permit Altman to introduce evidence during the trial that Clementi was upset over his mother’s rejection of his homosexuality and other incidents in his life. Berman also prohibited Altman from obtaining some items seized from Clementi’s possessions and computer, including the suicide note, Altman said.
“Now the argument has to be that the judge permitted evidence in that taints the entire verdict,” the attorney said. “The evidence about Tyler Clementi’s state-of-mind. Did that prejudice the jury?”
Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey said of the decision, “by reaffirming the constitutionality of two of the sections of the bias-intimidation statute, the Supreme Court has strengthened this very important law.”
“The conviction of Dharun Ravi still stands, and it would be inappropriate to comment further given the State’s ongoing appeal of the sentence,” Carey said. “Furthermore, for an attorney to describe his feelings as “ecstatic” in a case involving the death of a victim, is offensive and insensitive to the victim’s loved ones; and is violative of the spirit of the NJ Crime Victim’s Bill of Rights (N.J.S. 52:4B-36).”
The justices said the 36-page decision that, “whether a victim reasonably believes he was targeted for a bias crime will necessarily be informed by the victim’s individual experiences and distinctive cultural, historical, and familial heritage–all of which may be unknown or unknowable to the defendant.”
Altman said he intends to include that language in additional papers he will now file with the appeals court because there was no way for Ravi to know Clementi’s emotional state at the time of the incidents.
Although his bias crime convictions were second-degree crimes and he faced more than 10 years in prison, Berman sentenced the then 20-year-old Ravi to a 30-day term in the county jail, which he served.
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A gay blogger, moved by Clemente’s suicide but determined to give the public a full picture of his pre-suicide lifestyle, identified another salacious website, this one almost solely dedicated to live-feed sexual exhibitionism, having determined that Clementi personally frequented the site. The blogger published both Clementi’s user name and images from that website showing that Clementi apparently willingly used a webcam in conjunction with the website to engage in live solo sexual exhibitionism. So Clementi was by no means in the closet by the time his new roommate foolishly trained his own webcam on him. Like most high school graduates, Clementi was clearly eager to explore and enjoy newfound freedoms.
Hindsight may be 20/20. However, Clementi’s parents should never have let him leave for Rutgers so soon after he revealed his same-sex attraction to them. Instead, they should have interrupted his collegiate plans, kept him under their roof, and ministered to him. Instead, they allowed a intelligent and talented but sensitive and vulnerable young man to be exposed to the vagaries of the larger world for which, as later events clearly showed, he was woefully ill-prepared. Subsequent deliberate politicization of Clementi’s death by many individuals, organizations and movements has clearly contributed to America’s obvious cultural, social, and religious decline.
It is unfortunate that Clemente’s parents have chosen to work through their grief in part by getting involved, albeit unwillingly, in this process of politicization. And yes, anti-bullying activism is clearly primarily geared toward normalizing same-sex atraction and the homosexual lifestyle in the eyes of the public. Children younger than Clementi should be actively and uniformly discouraged from making the choices he made in response to nascent feelings of SSA.
Absolutley out standing …well said and about time someone said it.
anything to advance the gay agenda….
How could ANYONE possibly defend Ravi? The first poster clearly is extraordinarily insensitive.
8:18pm, assume everything that happened in the past, actually happened, except that instead of jumping off the GWB, Clementi got a text message frim his RA, thought better of the suicide attempt, returned to campus, came to terms with Ravi and his underlying resentment of and clear distaste for Clementi’s excessive use of the dorm room for gay sex, and got his life under some control. What then? Do you still clamor for Ravi to be punished for his failure to display perfect tolerance for alternative lifestyles? For Pete’s sake, he was a new freshman and had probably never come face to face with a promiscuous homosexual his own age. He was no hardened criminal and certainly couldn’t be presumed to know how close Clementi was to ending it all. Being blamed for Clemente’s death was never anything other than a bum rap, regardless of the prosecution’s legal theory, or the ins and outs of hate crime statutes and associated jurisprudence. The prosecution’s decisions about how to handle the case were never based on anything other than pure divide-and-conquer Alinskyite politics. This was a particularly shameful chapter in New Jersey’s legal history, and we would all be well served if his conviction were overturned on appeal and the associated criminal case never picked back up again.
Again, defense of Ravi is inexplicable. It is also horrifyingly disrespectful to the Clementi family. Dharun Ravi gets to live a full life. Tyler Clementi is dead.
Your up 8:18….
Let’s have a logical comment from you this time as opposed to simply
Saying how insensitive someone is.
We’re waiting…
8:46 – why don’t you go meditate with the deputy mayor. Or take a civility class with the mayor. You need to be nicer.