TWO days ago, an Ohio school superintendent, two coaches and a principal were charged by a grand jury for their involvement in the alleged cover-up of the 2012 rape of a drunken 16-year-old girl in Steubenville.

It is one of the most notorious rape cases in the last few years - football players Ma'Lik Richmond, 17, and Trent Mays, 17, were convicted of rape and sentenced to at least a year in the juvenile prison system.

But there is another man involved in the case who is facing more jail time than the rapists themselves - 26-year-old member of the Anonymous hacker collective Deric Lostutter.

In an extensive profile in Rolling Stone, Mr Lostutter explains why he decided to propel coverage of the rape case and allegations of a cover-up - and why he is facing up to 25 years in prison.

Mr Lostutter talks of his "nerdy" childhood during which he taught himself to code, and the inner-vigilante that has always part of him. One day when he returned home to find his mother being beaten by her boyfriend, he snapped, grabbed a knife and stabbed the man in the stomach.

"I spent the next four days cleaning blood off the floor. That pretty much changed me from the quiet nerdy kid to what I am now. And I haven't been able to shut it off since," he said.

Lostutter joined Anonymous after watching the documentary We Are Legion.

His activism started off small: a school board controversy, a friend whose ex-boyfriend had posted a nude picture of her on a revenge porn website.

But soon he was taking on big targets. First was the Westboro Baptist Church.

Then, a few nights before Christmas last year, he read a New York Times story about the rape of a 16-year-old girl and its alleged cover-up in the small town of Steubenville.

"The more I found out, the more angry I got," he said. "What really got me heated is her friends and everybody else's friends stood around and watched this sh** happen, and nobody did a f***ing thing."

He joined forces with other online activists outraged by the case, and the operation took off.

Public interest in the case increased with the circulation of a video, more than 12 minutes long, that purportedly showed young man (not Richmond or Mays) joking about the rape victim.

They also made public a picture of the purported rape victim being carried by her wrists and ankles by two young men, along with personal details and photos of Steubenville authorities and locals they believed to be involved in the alleged cover up.

Anonymous' targets told Rolling Stone the exposure "felt defamatory".

"A lot of what they were saying wasn't true, and they attacked people," said Steubenville police chief William McCafferty, who received death threats on Facebook and had his email hacked.

In March Mays and Richmond were convicted of rape and received minimum sentences of one year.

Lostutter thought these amounted to a "slap on the wrist".

On April 17 Lostutter was in the shower when he heard a truck outside. Next thing he knew, a SWAT team was storming his house.

He claims he is facing 25 years in prison, and also claims he simply helped lead the community of hackers but did not do any hacking himself.

"I didn't hack. I didn't guess the password … I didn't do sh**."

Read the full story at Rolling Stone.