State of New Jersey vs. Dharun Ravi was a criminal trial held in Middlesex County, New Jersey, Superior Court from February 24, 2012, to March 16, 2012, in which former Rutgers University undergraduate student Dharun Ravi was tried and convicted on 15 counts of crimes involving invasion of privacy, attempted invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, tampering with evidence, witness tampering, and hindering apprehension or prosecution.
The charges stemmed from incidents that occurred on September 19 and 21, 2010. On September 9, 2016, a New Jersey court of appeals overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial on narrower charges. The following month, Ravi accepted a plea deal and pleaded guilty to one count of attempted invasion of privacy.
In the first incident, Ravi and his friend Molly Wei used a webcam to view a private romantic encounter between Ravi's roommate, Tyler Clementi, and another man identified only as "M.B."
In the second incident, Ravi urged friends and Twitter followers to watch via his webcam a second private encounter between Clementi and M.B., though the viewing never occurred. Clementi died by suicide on September 22, 2010, and his death brought national and international attention to Ravi's trial.
On May 21, 2012, Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 3 years probation, 300 hours of community service, a $10,000 fine, and counseling on cyberbullying and alternate lifestyles. Ravi served 20 days of his 30-day jail term from May 31 to June 19, 2012, at the Middlesex County Adult Corrections Center in North Brunswick, New Jersey.
Events leading up to the indictments and trial
First webcam incident Before September 17, 2010, Clementi had chatted online with a man whose identity has not been made public. While Ravi was out for the evening on September 17, the man came to Clementi's dorm room for the first time.
On the nights of September 19 and 21, Clementi texted Ravi about using their room for the evening. On the first occasion, Ravi met Clementi's male friend, and Clementi said that the two wanted to be alone for the evening. In conversations with Wei and later text messages with friends, Ravi expressed distrust of the stranger that Clementi brought into the room, describing him as "an older, shabbier-looking guy".
Ravi said he was worried about theft and that he left the computer in a state where he could view the webcam due to those concerns. However, other witnesses testified that Ravi said he also wanted to confirm that Clementi was gay. Ravi and Wei viewed the livestream via iChat for a few seconds, seeing Clementi and his guest kissing. Ravi posted to his 150 Twitter followers, "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay." Soon after, Wei began an online chat in which she said that the two men had been "kissing [each other] right now / like THEY WERE GROPING EACH OTHER." Later, Wei turned on the camera for another view with four others in the room, though Ravi was not there. During this second viewing, Wei and others saw Clementi and his guest kissing with their shirts off and their pants on.
Clementi followed Ravi on Twitter. Although Clementi could not see Ravi's phone text messages, he saw his Twitter postings the next day. Clementi viewed Ravi's Twitter posts 38 times following the first webcam viewing. Late on September 20, Clementi wrote to a friend online that, initially, he was not really bothered by what Ravi had seen in the first, brief viewing, primarily due to its extreme brevity. According to a Rutgers employee, at about 4 a.m. on September 21, after further conversations online, Clementi sent an online request for a single room because his "roommate used webcam to spy on me."
Second planned webcam viewing On September 21, Ravi sent a friend a series of text messages, including messages saying, "Yeah, keep the gays away" and "People are having a viewing party with a bottle of Bacardi and beer in this kid's room for my roommate" along with directions on how to view it remotely.
At 6:39 p.m., Ravi tweeted, "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it's happening again." Ravi had set up the webcam and initially pointed it towards Clementi's bed. Ravi later stated that he realized that his "joke" was "stupid", and pointed the webcam towards his own bed before the planned viewing on September 21. The police say, however, that it was subsequently found still pointed directly at Clementi's bed. When Ravi's friend suggested that Clementi and his guest might use his bed, Ravi said "My webcam checks my bed, hahaha."
At trial, two Rutgers students testified that Ravi used their computers to verify that the webcam was still focused on Clementi's bed. One testified that, after Ultimate frisbee practice that evening, Ravi "told me he had set up a webcam of some sort to capture images of his roommate. He told me he had done it before that date" and "that he was planning on doing it again. That night." When Clementi returned to his room, he noticed the camera and texted a friend saying he had unplugged Ravi's power strip to prevent further video streaming during his date. Ravi later said that he had changed his mind regarding the broadcast and disabled the camera himself by putting the computer to sleep.
On September 21, Clementi complained to a resident assistant and two other officials that Ravi had used a webcam to livestream part of Clementi's private sexual encounter with another man. The resident assistant testified at trial that Clementi appeared shaky and uncomfortable when they met around 11 p.m., and in his official report of the meeting, the resident assistant said that Clementi requested both punishment and a room change for Ravi.
In a formal e-mail request to the resident assistant made after the meeting, Clementi described the two viewing incidents, quoted from Ravi's Twitter postings, and wrote "I feel that my privacy has been violated and I am extremely uncomfortable sharing a room with someone who would act in this wildly inappropriate manner." Clementi wrote in detail on the Just Us Boys and Yahoo! message boards about complaints he filed through university channels about his roommate. His posts indicated that he did not want to share a room with Ravi after he learned about the first incident and then discovered that Ravi invited his Twitter followers to watch a second sexual encounter. "He [the resident assistant] seemed to take it seriously," Clementi wrote in a post about 15 hours before his jump from the George Washington Bridge.
On September 22, a friend of Ravi asked what had happened to the livestream the night before. Ravi responded, "It got messed up and didn't work." In the afternoon, the resident assistant confronted Ravi about Clementi's written complaint. Within a few hours, Clementi returned to his dorm room and he and Ravi were there together for less than an hour.
Clementi's suicide and Ravi's apologies
On the evening of September 22, the day after Ravi's second webcam transmission attempt, Clementi left the dorm room and got food. At around 6:30 p.m., he headed toward the George Washington Bridge. By 8:42 p.m., Clementi had made his way to the George Washington Bridge and posted from his cell phone on Facebook, "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."
Five minutes after Clementi posted on Facebook, Ravi sent the first of two final messages to Clementi. The messages were sent after Ravi had been visited that afternoon by the resident assistant and told of Clementi's complaint:I want to explain what happened. Sunday night when you requested to have someone over I didn't realize you wanted the room in private. I went to Molly's room and I was showing her how I set up my computer so I can access it from anywhere. I turned on my camera and saw you in the corner of the screen and I immediately closed it. I felt uncomfortable and guilty of what happened. Obviously I told people what occurred so they could give me advice. Then Tuesday when you requested the room again I wanted to make sure what happened Sunday wouldn't happen again and not to video chat me from 930 to 12. Just in case, I turned my camera away and put my computer to sleep so even if anyone tried it wouldn't work. I wanted to make amends for Sunday night. I'm sorry if you heard something distorted and disturbing but I assure you all my actions were good natured.
The prosecution noted that the apology came after Ravi learned he faced discipline by Rutgers. Prosecutor Julia McClure said that the apology was one of "many attempts" by Ravi to "dilute, cover up and explain, in other words to tamper with the facts and to fabricate evidence that could be looked on as favorable to him."
Ten minutes later, Ravi texted again:
Indictments On September 28, 2010, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei were charged with four and two counts of invasion of privacy, respectively, for their roles in the webcam spying incidents on September 19, 2010 and September 21, 2010.
Under New Jersey law, one commits a fourth-degree crime of invasion of privacy if one observes another person without that person's consent under circumstances in which a "reasonable person would know that another may expose intimate parts or may engage in sexual penetration or sexual contact." A third-degree crime is committed if one discloses a "reproduction of the image" of the observed person. Ravi was charged with both third- and fourth-degree invasion of privacy.
Soon after these charges were filed, there were calls from gay rights advocates and bloggers to include hate crimes charges against Ravi and Wei.
Bruce Kaplan, the prosecutor in the case, said "now that two individuals have been charged with invasion of privacy, we will be making every effort to assess whether bias played a role in the incident, and, if so, we will bring appropriate charges." On October 4, 2010, Kaplan stated that he did not think there would be enough evidence to charge Ravi and Wei with a hate crime. After further investigation, the prosecution concluded that there was evidence supporting a hate crime charge against Ravi, dating to when Ravi first learned of Clementi's name. On April 20, 2011, a Middlesex County grand jury indicted Ravi on 15 counts, including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, witness tampering, and evidence tampering.
The witness tampering charges were based on text messages Ravi sent to Wei, in which he tried to persuade her not to contradict what he had told police. In these messages, Ravi said "Did you tell them we did it on purpose?", and "Because I said we were just messing around with the camera." Wei responded "Omg dharun why didnt u talk to me first i told them everything". According to a prosecution expert witness, Ravi deleted almost 100 text messages between him, Wei and another high school friend, whom he had invited to view Clementi's second encounter with his guest. A key aspect of the prosecution's evidence tampering charge was Ravi's deletion of two potentially incriminating postings: one on Twitter on September 19 in which he wrote that his roommate was "making out with a dude. Yay", and one on September 21 in which he told his iChat followers "dare you to video chat me" during the time of Clementi's tryst. He replaced the latter post with one that said "don't you dare video chat me" at the time of the tryst, stating that the first message was a draft. Ravi was charged with third and fourth degree invasion of privacy.
Public statements by defense Soon after the charges against Wei were made public, Wei's attorneys released a statement proclaiming her innocence, and a former New Jersey federal prosecutor commented that, "there's no evidence of Ms. Wei doing anything. I'm very curious as to why the prosecutor is holding her responsible in any way, shape, or form simply because Mr. Ravi was using her computer."