The Rutgers Student Who Died...

As I'm sure many of you have heard a recent tragedy took place at Rutgers, where a student committed suicide after acquaintances recorded a sexual encounter. I believe it was supposedly a consensual homosexual encounter, but either way they posted it online and the man killed himself as a result of it.

I went to Rutgers. I know that they have an extremely large internal file sharing system that allows students from all across the various campuses to share files. Its much like how any bit torrent site works only it runs off the school's networks. I bring that up because at the time I recall something similar happening to an acquaintance of mine, I say acquaintence because I like veryone else wasn't a fan of him but he and I just seemed to particularly not get along. I won't name him but this was a guy that was extremely abrasive to everyone around him and people made an embarrassing video of him and posted it on the schools network. I think within days pretty much the entire school had seen this thing. It was strangely popular and the poor kid immediately became a laughing stock. It really wasn't that funny then and in the case of this poor victim, its not funny now.

I understand that the two perpetrators were probably thinking it was a funny joke and they certainly didn't expect what happened to happen but they need to be punished for their actions. I support the school in taking this legally as far as they can go with it. It was essentially cyber-bullying. Heck I'll go even further and say that it was tantamount to rape. They raped this kids image and left him in an extremely stressful position of having everyone see something that was intended to only be private. I don't mean to disrespect all Rutgers students but there a disproportionate amount of ass-holes up there. Its Jersey and that Jersey Shore stereo-type exists. And I'm sure this kid got a lot of shit over this video before he ultimately decided to commit suicide. I'm not condoning what the victim did but when you're that age, struggling with sexual identity, it's not surprising he did what he did.