When Burger King is parodying an underage rape victim to sell hamburgers, you know something is wrong. But that’s what happened last month when the fast food chain released an online ad for a discount on Big King burgers that featured the image of Diana S, a 17-year-old rape victim. Soon the company had deleted the post, but the message was clear: Diana, who spoke out about her rape at the hands of a 21-year-old man on the Russian evening talk show Pust Govoryat (Let Them Talk), had become an internet meme and — to many — the villain in the rape case that electrified Russia. On the talk show, commentators blamed Diana for provoking sexual assault. On Youtube, video bloggers denounced her as a calculating libertine who sent a young man to prison and ruined his life. On social media, Russians turned the image of Diana using her thumb and forefinger to demonstrate how little she drank the night she was raped into a meme. That meme eventually found its way into the Burger King ad, where the hand gesture was used to demonstrate how long the discount would last: “Not very long.” Diana's transformation from ordinary victim into media celebrity and public enemy has raised serious questions about how Russia relates to sexual assault and its victims. Advocates for assault victims suggest the saga says a lot about public attitudes. Russian society supports the myth that the victim is responsible for sexual assault, says Nadezhda Zamotaeva, executive director of the Sisters sexual assault recovery center. “Sadly, this tells us that violence is habitual, unconscious, and permissible for members of our society,” she told The Moscow Times.

What Happened On March 31, 2016, a group of young men rented a house on the edge of Ulyanovsk, a town in central Russia, to celebrate a friend’s 20th birthday. They purchased beer, vodka, and reportedly spice, a narcotic for smoking. They decided to invite girls. Diana, then 16, got an invitation to the party from a friend. At the birthday celebration, Diana drank vodka and made the acquaintance of Sergei Semyonov, a 21-year-old student at the local agricultural academy. Eventually, Diana and Semyonov ended up alone in a room in the house. There, Diana told the police, Semyonov forced himself on her and beat and raped her. The case went to court and, in December 2016, the judge ruled that Semyonov knew Diana was underage and understood that she did not want to have sex with him. Semyonov was sentenced to eight years in a prison colony for “rape” and “violent acts of a sexual nature.” An appellate court later reduced his sentence to three years and three months. Even before Diana's television debut, the case had provoked controversy. After the first ruling, groups in support of both Diana and Semyonov appeared on the Russian Vkontakte social network. The larger group took Semyonov’s side. Its 17,000 members wanted to draw attention to “an unjust court,” one of the group’s founders told the Meduza news website. People’s Court To help their son, Semyonov’s family approached state-owned Channel One’s Pust Govoryat, an evening talk show known for its own brand of lurid melodrama. Beyond that, the show serves as a place where outraged Russians bring their grievances to the public. Sergei Semyonov’s case was exactly the kind of story that Pust Govoryat was looking for. The show, broadcast on Jan. 31, 2017, brought Semyonov’s mother and sister face-to-face with Diana and her father. But it was hardly a fair match. Almost all the panelists — often models and bloggers — and most of the audience were clearly on the side of Semyonov. Even the host Andrei Malakhov presented the subject of the broadcast as, “Why intimacy with Diana destroyed [Sergei’s] future.” During the broadcast, Diana's coiffed hair and makeup attracted particular attention from the public. Many viewers saw her appearance and the variety of emotions she expressed during the show as proof of her dishonesty. She did not look like a victim of sexual assault, they felt. Diana contends that the television studio did her hair and makeup and chose her outfit. The panelists aggressively interrogated Diana about how much vodka she drank and what she expected when she went into the room alone with Semyonov. Malakhov also played a video from one of Diana's social media accounts — discovered by Semyonov’s mother — that showed her riding drunk in the passenger seat of a car with some visibly older men and singing along to a song about sex and drugs. This demonstrates “how much the myth that women provoke sexual violence exists in the minds of Russians,” says Andrei Sinelnikov, deputy director of the Anna Center, an NGO helping victims of domestic violence. The Pust Govoryat broadcast also revealed several new details about the case. On air, Diana explained that another young man had also raped her that night, but because she was not fully conscious at the time and could not actively resist, the police did not register it as a crime. Additionally, Semyonov’s sister revealed that Diana and her family had previously pressed criminal charges against her ex-boyfriend for having sex with a minor. Diana’s lawyer confirmed this story to the Meduza news site.

Diana S on the Russian television show Let Them Talk, Jan. 31, 2017 YouTube