Three teenagers were clustered around the cell phone, heads almost touching as they peered at the video. "Eww...that’s nasty." A surge of excitement, of almost electric disgust, passed between them. It was Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend. The Texas morning was warm and overcast, the air spongy. In the cafeteria of Cleveland High School, the students jockeyed with one another to get a better view of the tiny screen. They could see a naked girl lying on a mattress. A guy moving on top of her. A wall of legs surrounded the couple, like a slatted fence. The faces of the others in the room weren’t visible, only their legs and feet, shifting impatiently. It looked like there were eight to ten guys watching the girl, watching and waiting their turn. Each time the guys switched places, another face was revealed—some of them were boys in their school. (One later told a female classmate that he’d stuck a beer bottle into the girl.) Others were older and unfamiliar. But as the video flew from phone to phone that day, almost everyone recognized the girl on the mattress—that long ink black hair, the brown eyes and baby cheeks. She was a sixth grader from the middle school next door. An 11-year-old.

Two and a half months later, the arrests began. On February 18, four Cleveland men were picked up and charged with "continuous sexual abuse" of a child. In court documents, she was referred to as "Regina D. Stewart," a pseudonym. Over the next three weeks, fifteen more men and boys, ranging in age from 16 to 27, were indicted for "aggravated sexual abuse" of a child, bringing the total number of defendants to nineteen. Nineteen men and boys who, if the charges were true, had gathered in a place where no one lived but them—no police, no girlfriends, no fathers, no mothers or grandmothers—and what was wrong became, if not exactly right, then all right. They would all plead not guilty.

Even before the arrests, the press descended on this East Texas town of 8,000 where half the population is white, a quarter is black, and a quarter, Hispanic. Located just forty-five miles north of Houston, Cleveland is both rural and citified. Families keep chickens and donkeys while fast-food restaurants pull in traffic off the main drag. The crime rate is high, the faces are friendly, and the air smells of crispy chicken, toasted ancho peppers, fresh-cut grass, manure, truck fumes, lilacs, pine sap, and mud.

By mid-December, TV-news trucks were gathered outside the high school. Reporters ducked into pews at church services and, notebooks in hand, grimly worked the playgrounds. Each new development brought another wave of media attention. Frustrated, a Cleveland teenager posted on Facebook, "man yall y r we still on the fuckin news they need to let that shit go." The story, already red-hot, became inflammatory when it was reported that all of the suspects were black and the victim Hispanic. Friends and relatives of the men and boys were quoted defending them and blaming the girl, who they said acted much older than 11, wearing makeup and sexy clothes. They speculated that she had probably lied about her age, so how were the males to know? The New York Times was roundly castigated for its "rape-friendly" coverage of the assault, which was heavy on sympathetic quotes about the defendants and uncritical of malicious comments about the victim. After receiving tens of thousands of readers’ complaints, the Times took the extraordinary step of sending its reporter back to Cleveland for a do-over, and the media began to cover its own coverage. Clearly no one was planning to "let that shit go" anytime soon.