“You should just start a conversation,” Yang wrote. “Like...hey, how the heck do I pronounce your name?” Clementi said, “I actually got it down pat I think / dah rune.” The curtains on Ravi’s side of the room were closed, and Clementi felt unable to ask his roommate to open them. Yang offered guidance: “Try hey, by any chance, would you mind opening the shades on your window?”
“That’s too funny / your giving me scripted conversations,” Clementi said. He called her “the screenplay writer for my life.”
Ravi and Clementi lived together for three weeks, but seem to have barely had a conversation. In an I.M. exchange with Sam Cruz, Clementi said, “I don’t think I’ve actually ever talked to him heheh...we kinda just ignore ea[ch] other.” Ravi told police that, every time he spoke with Clementi, it was “short and brief. I figured, Oh, he was just a shy kid.” He added that Clementi “didn’t seem to have any friends.” Ravi does seem to have recognized Clementi’s good nature. Tam showed me messages that Ravi wrote on August 29th: “He’s mad nice and mad quiet,” and “I think my roommate likes his privacy so I’ve been out of my room.” And though Clementi was sometimes annoyed by Ravi’s mess—in one chat, he mentioned a yogurt container left out for days—he also detected thoughtfulness and intelligence beneath Ravi’s swagger. He was impressed with his roommate’s tech skills; Ravi had written a speaking computer program called Jarvis, after the computer valet in the “Iron Man” films. Jarvis kept track of Ravi’s class schedule, and announced when university buses were due. (In an August conversation about his roommate, Ravi had joked, “I’ll have Jarvis warn me if he tries to rape me at night.”)
Clementi was intending to major in biology, but he kept up with the violin. He auditioned for the university’s second-rung orchestra but was offered a place in the Rutgers Symphony, which is made up largely of doctoral students in music. Its first concert, in October, was to include Berlioz’s tempestuous “Symphonie Fantastique.” Kynan Johns, the university’s director of orchestras, was very impressed by Clementi’s playing, and also noted his social awkwardness, which he regarded as typical freshman reserve. “I was hoping he would eventually transfer over into a music major,” Johns told me. In Davidson C, Clementi practiced his violin, despite being self-conscious about filling the corridor with sound.
Ravi was often out carousing until five in the morning. Clementi was not, though he sometimes went to parties with a group of four teetotalling girls. “I would die if I was forced to always have people around me,” he told Cruz. “The first week here was so hard b/c of that and my roommie purposely left me alone.” Ravi, he noted, had been “very considerate and perceptive.”
In high school, Clementi had not been widely regarded as gay. He had been posting messages at Justusboys since he was fourteen, but they were rarely sexual; rather, he exchanged views about television and compact cars with other affable contributors, some of whom used names like Bigpimpboy14. In one post, Clementi wrote, “Call me a prude but I honestly don’t think people are mature enough to be having sex prior to collegeish years in today’s world....Sex isn’t something a 16 y/o should really need to spend much time debating. Then again, I’m practically asexual, and considered myself such until about 17 (when I started puberty), so I guess I have a lot of bias.” This post may well reflect the truth, but he wrote it when he was sixteen.
After Clementi’s death, his parents learned that he had come out to a friend in the spring of 2010, and that in the summer he had apparently met romantic or sexual partners online. Three days before starting at Rutgers, he came out to his family.
When he described that experience to Cruz, Clementi reported that his father was “very accepting” of his news, but added, “Its a good thing dad is ok w/it or I would be in serious trouble / mom has basically completely rejected me.” He later added that she had been “very dismissive.”
Jane Clementi told me recently that Tyler announced his sexuality to her in a private, late-night conversation, which “snowballed” to cover his perceived shortage of friends and the uncertainty he had about his faith. At the end of their talk, she recalled, “he cried, I cried, we hugged.” They said that they loved each other. But, Jane Clementi said, “I must admit, other than being surprised, I felt betrayed.” He had not confided in her, though he had known he was gay since middle school. She told me that she and her husband had long assumed that Tyler’s brother James was gay, and had even discussed the matter with Tyler, asking him, “Why won’t he just talk about it?” (James is now out.)
The day after Tyler’s disclosure, she said, “I guess part of me was grieving a little bit. I expected Tyler to be married one day, and be a father.” She said, “I was sad, I was quiet,” and she wonders if this is what he was reacting to when he wrote “rejected”; the word hurt her. She recalled that she spent the rest of the week with him, delivered him to college, and, throughout September, spoke to him on the phone. And she was expecting to visit Tyler for Parent and Family Weekend: “We had tickets to the football game. We had plans for the day.”
In September, Clementi attended at least one meeting of the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance, a Rutgers student organization. As he put it to Cruz, “I would consider myself out...if only there was someone for me to come out to.” Though he may have been slow to develop sexually, by the time he reached Rutgers he had found a streak of boldness. This perhaps left him exposed: once he overcame his shyness, he was not shy at all. His sexual self—born on the Internet, in the shadow of p*rnography—seems to have been largely divorced from his social self. After Clementi died, Gawker found what appeared to be an account that he had opened at Cam4, a site where women and men put on sexual displays, by webcam. Clementi also used a hookup Web site called Adam4adam. On September 2nd, Cruz told him, “U need to get away from the computer...specially adam.”
“Carol—you’re muttering about NPR again.” Link copied
Two weeks later, Clementi described to Cruz a recent liaison—“SOOO good”—with a man who visited him in Davidson Hall on September 16th, after the two of them had first considered renting a motel room. This was M.B., who will lose his anonymity if he gives evidence at Ravi’s trial. According to Clementi, M.B. was twenty-five, working two jobs, not out, and nervous about coming to the dorm. (Rooms could be reached only by walking through the student lounge.) Clementi, who said that he had texted Ravi to request use of the room, joked that it “would be so awk” if Ravi walked in “while I’m getting f*cked,” adding, “At the same time i think I would just be like ‘screw it.’ ”
On September 19th, a Sunday, Clementi was expecting M.B. to visit again. As before, he asked Ravi for the room with a text message. That evening, Ravi played Ultimate Frisbee (a sport that, in one online discussion of the Clementi case, was predictably described as “gayer than having sex with a dude”). He returned to Davidson Hall at about nine. Ravi told the police he thought that Clementi “was just having a friend over to hang out.” Ravi started collecting things for a shower, down the hall, and Clementi asked, “Do you need anything else?” According to the statement made to the police by Wei, who spoke to Ravi a moment later, Ravi only then realized that he was being asked not to return; he recalled saying to Clementi, “Oh, you want me to leave?”
At the start of the semester, Wei, overlooking Ravi’s past rudeness, had become friendly with him again. Upon leaving Room 30, Ravi apparently first made a quick visit to her room, across the hall. Wei said that he was agitated, asking, “Why does he want the room all to himself?” He then returned to his room, and was getting organized for his evening’s exile when Clementi retrieved M.B. at the dormitory entrance and brought him to the room. Ravi said of his brief encounter with M.B., “He didn’t acknowledge me at all. He just sat on the bed, on Tyler’s bed.”
Ravi returned to Wei’s room. She recalled him saying, “It’s a really old-looking guy, like, What the heck, what’s going on?” Ravi thought that M.B. seemed “really shady.” She went on, “He actually was kind of angry. He’s, like, ‘If he steals my iPad I’m going to make Tyler pay for it.’ And he’s, like, ‘Oh, and my roommate’s gay, like what if something else is going on?’ ” Speaking to the police, Ravi recalled M.B. as “slightly overweight,” with facial hair of some sort. Ravi’s reaction appears to have included some class prejudice: the man, apparently working-class, was a likely thief. He was “random,” as one of Molly Wei’s friends later put it—he was troublingly not of their world.
If Ravi was as disoriented as Wei claims, one can perhaps see why: Clementi was hesitant to talk about curtains, but in a busy dorm, after less than a month of cohabitation, he had kicked out his roommate so that he could have a sexual encounter with an older man who made no pretense of being his boyfriend. Ravi also noted, perhaps, the contrast between his constant flutter of self-promotion and Clementi’s quiet, unswerving path to gratification. Jason Tam told me that he’d never known Ravi to have a girlfriend.
According to Tam, Ravi had already explored unorthodox uses of webcams. For a high-school physics project, Ravi had tried to link a webcam to a hobbyist coil gun. In the summer before college, he wrote a computer program that prompted webcams to snap photographs, at intervals, and upload them to a Web site. He disguised the program as something else, and tried to get friends to install it. Some did, Tam said, but they weren’t tricked: they “noticed their webcam light turn on, so it was obvious.” (Clementi, then, was apparently not the first subject of a webcam experiment.) Tam thinks that, by the evening of September 19th, Ravi had already told him that he intended to use a webcam to see why Clementi had begun asking for exclusive use of their room.
An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.
According to Wei, she and Ravi “saw Tyler and his friend, or whoever that was—their upper body.” She remembered that the two men were fully dressed, standing against the door. (Ravi later said that they had their shirts off.) “I couldn’t see any faces, and they were just what seemed to be kissing, and then, after literally two seconds, we just turned it off. And we were kind of both kind of in shock, because for me, anyway, I’ve never seen anything like that.” Ravi told police, “I just felt, like, really, like, really uncomfortable and, like, almost guilty that I saw it.” Wei recalled, “At first, we were both, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we can’t tell anybody about this, we’re just going to pretend this never happened.’ ”
