Anonymous posted that it wouldn’t let “young men who turn to rape as a game or sport get the pass,” adding, “This is a call to arms.” Illustration by Noma Bar

One Saturday last August, a sixteen year-old girl in West Virginia did something that teen-agers do: she told her parents that she was sleeping at another girl’s house, across the Ohio River, and then, after her mother dropped her off there, she and a few friends headed into the hot summer night to a party. She brought a bottle of vodka with her, and she used it to spike a slushy that she bought at a gas station on the way to their destination, in a town called Steubenville.

At the party, she met up with a sixteen-year-old named Trent Mays, a good-looking, dark-haired football player with whom she’d been flirting by text and tweet. She’d been “talking to him,” a porous term that teen-agers use to refer to a romantic relationship that is unlikely to be exclusive, and can involve spending time together or just courting through social media. A friend of Mays’s named Anthony Craig had also been talking to the girl that summer. Months later, a prosecutor asked Craig if he had been dating her, and he replied that some people “may look at it as that.” He meant people on the outside of adolescent culture, who have to translate contemporary categories into old-fashioned ones that they can understand.

Like most teen-agers, the girl was very active online: she had profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Prezi, which explained that her favorite color was pink, her favorite movie was “Mean Girls,” and her favorite stores were Hollister, Juicy Couture, and Victoria’s Secret. “I like anything sparkly,” she posted. Trent Mays, a good student with a buzz cut and a belligerent sense of humor, also used Twitter to express his enthusiasms: “There is just something bout girls in jean shorts.”

About fifty teen-agers were at the party, and no adults. There were lots of football players and wrestlers from Steubenville High School—Big Red, people call it—and there was lots of liquor and beer. Many of the kids were drinking, but the girl from West Virginia was unusually intoxicated, and people talked about it. At around midnight, the hostess’s older brother came in and, according to a senior named Mark Cole, determined that “the party was getting out of hand and said everyone had to leave.” Cole decided to drive to another party, nearby, and he was joined by two mainstays of the football team: Mays, the quarterback, and Ma’lik Richmond, a big, soft-spoken sophomore who was the star wide receiver and an honor-roll student. The girl from West Virginia wanted to go, too, and was “very loud” about it, Cole said. “Her friends tried to get her to stay with them, but she screamed and denied and said that she wanted to come with us.” One of her friends later told the police that she tried to stop her, “because she’s done this before; I was, like, She’s not doing this again.” But the girl was so set on getting in the car that she became physically combative: “She wanted to go with Trent.”

At the next party, she threw up in the bathroom. “She was very drunk,” Cole recalled, “like she wasn’t fully capable of walking on her own.” It was a smaller gathering, of about a dozen teens, and, not long after the group arrived, the host’s mother came downstairs and said that anyone who wasn’t sleeping over had to go home. Anthony Craig said later that he remembered Mays and Ma’lik Richmond carrying the girl from West Virginia outside.

In front of the house, she sat down in the middle of the street and vomited again. That, she says, is the last thing she remembers about the night of August 11th. She was bewildered when she woke up the next morning on a couch in Mark Cole’s basement, naked and unable to find her cell phone. But when her friends came to pick her up, they said, she seemed fine with where she was: lying next to Trent Mays on the couch, where they’d slept under a Steelers blanket.

Two weeks later, a forty-five-year-old blogger named Alexandria Goddard heard that Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond had been arrested for rape; it was all anyone in Steubenville was talking about. Goddard had lived in Steubenville years before, and she retained an interest in what went on there. She had spent her childhood nearby, “in the deep-down bowels of West Virginia,” in a house with no running water, and had gone to high school in Columbus. In her sophomore year, she started working in a defense attorney’s office, and continued for more than a decade. She always wanted to be a lawyer, but “life got in the way,” she said. Fifteen years ago, when she was going through her second divorce, she went to live with her mother, in Steubenville, and got a job as a ward clerk in the emergency room at Ohio Valley Medical Center.

At the hospital—and in Steubenville generally—she found the enthusiasm for Big Red football alarming. “When I saw how the nurses’ locker room was bedazzled like a cheerleader’s bedroom, I just remember standing there thinking, Oh, my God,” Goddard said. There were posters all over the walls saying “Roll Red Roll,” the chant that echoes from Steubenville’s Harding Stadium during football games. Though there are fewer than eight hundred students in the high school, the stadium has ten thousand seats—half as many as Madison Square Garden. Each time Big Red scores, a giant statue of a stallion spits out a six-foot flame. Goddard’s stepfather served for years on the board of the team’s boosters. “Grown men,” Goddard said. “Twenty years out of high school and they’re still reliving it. They can’t get over that their lives suck.”

The steel mills that used to keep the local economy thrumming are abandoned now, and the drive into Steubenville, past the few working factories along the Ohio River, gives you the lonely feeling of being left behind. The town’s most famous son, Dean Martin, moved away in the nineteen-thirties, but the road that runs along its eastern perimeter bears his name, and other local landmarks evoke his career in the entertainment business: the Bob Evans diner sits across Sunset Boulevard from the Hollywood Plaza. Since 1970, the population of Steubenville has declined forty per cent, to about eighteen thousand. The median income is $33,188, and more than a quarter of the residents live below the poverty line.

At times, the town has seemed so diminished that it was unable to govern itself. In 1997, the Department of Justice cited the police department for excessive use of force, false arrests, and tampering with evidence. Over two decades, according to reports, Steubenville lost or settled forty-eight civil-rights lawsuits, and paid out more than eight hundred thousand dollars in claims. In resolving the Department of Justice’s complaint, it became the second city in the country to allow Justice to monitor its police department, an arrangement that lasted until 2005.

But in football Steubenville is triumphant. Big Red has won nine state championships—including three under the current coach, Reno Saccoccia—and its best players are the town’s heroes. “It’s like you’re playing N.F.L. or college,” a sophomore on the team told me. “You go into stores, people come up to you asking you questions about Big Red. Everybody knows you.” In a town cemetery, one woman’s headstone is engraved with “Roll Red Roll.”

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At night, Goddard tended bar at Enzo’s, a place off the main drag that is not marked by any sign. Regulars are given a key to the front door and run tabs for months, or years. The clients are cops and other locals, many of whom have known each other their whole lives. Goddard—a big woman with striking green eyes and long streaked blond hair, who wears a silver high-heeled-shoe pendant around her neck—was popular there. At the bar and at the hospital, she befriended many of the town’s policemen. “Cops are always bringing drunk people into the E.R.,” she explained. And when they came into Enzo’s after their shift “we had a blast.”