Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi sits outside the courtroom in New Brunswick before he was convicted on most counts in his webcam spying trial. (John Munson/The Star-Ledger)
By Eric Marcus It seems easy to assign blame in the wake of Tyler Clementi’s suicide. Clementi jumped to his death days after his college roommate spied on him while Clementi had an intimate encounter with another man in their dorm room. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, left an electronic trail of outrageous messages that instantly turned the public against him. Long before the jury announced its decision on charges ranging from invasion of privacy to bias intimidation, the public’s verdict was clear: Ravi was to blame for Clementi’s death. Even I blamed him and I know better. Assigning blame in the aftermath of a suicide usually plays out in private — more than 37,000 times a year in the United States. Typically, no formal charges are filed, but every surviving parent, spouse, friend and colleague becomes accuser and accused, judge and jury.
At least that’s how it worked after my father’s 1970 suicide. Everyone pointed fingers at everyone, in part to displace whatever misplaced guilt they may have felt about failing to keep Dad alive. Not surprisingly, my mom was the primary target. She was the one who asked Dad to move out. In the months that followed, my dad, who had a history of mental illness, grew increasingly despondent and killed himself. However unfair, connecting Mom’s actions to Dad’s made sense. Anyone who has lived through the suicide of a loved one knows what I’m talking about. It’s perfectly natural in the wake of such shocking and poorly understood deaths to want to lay blame as we search for answers. We plague ourselves with the “whys” and “what ifs” and look around us — and at ourselves — to make sense of what happened and decide who was responsible. With Ravi and Clementi, that impulse proved irresistible yet again.
We all know that Ravi didn’t physically push Clementi to his death, but it made sense to blame him because we assumed his reckless and callous actions were more than just potential triggers. It looked as though his actions made the events that followed inevitable.
It’s not nearly so simple. We don’t know why Clementi took his life, just as I’ll never really know why my dad ended his. We don’t even know whether Clementi felt bullied, intimidated or even humiliated. What we do know is that bullying, intimidation and humiliation don’t automatically lead to suicide. If they did, few of us would have survived adolescence. At best, we can say that Ravi’s spying and subsequent Twitter messages might have triggered Clementi’s suicide, which is different from causing his suicide. We know, from research, that more than 90 percent of people who take their own lives have some kind of underlying mental disorder at the time of their deaths, most commonly, depression. But with Clementi, we just don’t know what factors came to bear that caused him to end his life. Of course, Ravi is responsible for what he actually did and what he did, as far as we can tell, may have inadvertently triggered an extreme response that no one could have imagined. But no matter how reprehensible Ravi’s actions were, he’s not to blame for causing Clementi’s suicide. Ravi didn’t kill Clementi, just as my mom didn’t kill my dad. Dad and Tyler Clementi killed themselves.
Absent Clementi’s suicide, Ravi might be facing suspension from school for his obnoxious prank rather than 10 years behind bars following a trial that’s been billed as a test case on “bullying over homosexuality in the digital age.” But if we’re honest with ourselves, Ravi’s trial was about assigning blame. More importantly, it was a test of our ability to navigate an exceedingly complex mix of issues about which we’re woefully ignorant, from sexuality and the responsible use of new technologies to bullying and suicide.
In our rush to judgment, we’ve failed that test miserably. We’ve turned Tyler Clementi into a two-dimensional symbol of anti-gay bullying and Dharun Ravi into a scapegoat. This is a case that screams out for compassion and understanding. Instead, we’ve laid blame for a tragic act none of us fully understands on the head of a foolish, immature young man. Eric Marcus is the author of “Why Suicide?” and “What If Someone I Know Is Gay?” He serves on the national board of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
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