Let’s Hope Hollywood Doesn’t Glamorize The Rapists In The Stuebenville Vs. Anonymous Movie
People keep asking me how I feeeeeel about the news that Brad Pitt‘s Plan B Entertainment is making a movie about the Rolling Stone article ANONYMOUS VS. STEUBENVILLE written by David Kushner. It makes sense that this case would be made into a movie. It was a huge case, politically charged, and Anonymous is an inherently sexy subject matter, they are mysterious, they are interesting, and in my opinion, without their work, and the work of Alexandria Goddard this case would have never made headlines like it did, never went to court, and most importantly, never opened up a worldwide dialogue about rape, rape culture, consent and how not to treat a drunk girl at a party.
I’d like to believe Plan B will treat this story with the sensitivity it deserves, and I have faith they will, especially considering they also produced 12 Years A Slave and according to the Tracking Board Website:
The project is said to focus on the life of Lostutter, his involvement with the hacking group Anonymous, and how it was to come that his uncovering of the truth would find him facing 20-years in prison, while the rapists he revealed were only facing 1 year in prison.
I don’t know how Deric feels about this, or Alexandria, or any of the other hundreds of people who associate with Anonymous feel about it because I haven’t asked them. That’s sort of the thing with the whole Steubenville rape case, a lot of us who cared about it and supported the Jane Doe victim and wrote about it and attended rallies for it and everything else everyone did don’t talk about it much. The rapists got their hands slapped. Hundreds of other girls are raped and victimized daily. Kids still get trashed at parties and still don’t help drunk girls who vomit in the street. People still blame these girls, the victims.
It mattered. What everyone did. And it still matters today when a collective, whether that be Anonymous or those who considers themselves Anonymous or anyone really, in this great big wide world, cares about these girls, especially when it seems like entire towns are all too willing to turn their backs on them. It will be interesting to see what Hollywood does with this project, if it turns out to be a story of two heroic football players, good boys who just made a mistake, or whether it focuses on the heroic efforts of a bunch of people in masks who gave a damn when it seemed no one else did.
(Image: twitter)
