Rutgers student, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide after suffering bullying from being gay. Clementi's roommate, Dhuran Ravi, and his friend, Molly Wei, placed a webcam in Clementi's room to videotape Clementi's encounter with another man. Ravi sent messages via Twitter inviting his friends to watch on iChat (Basu). It is still uncertain as to what charges Ravi and Wei will face, although some gay rights groups are requesting that New Jersey's hate crime law be enforced, which could potentially raise the maximum penalty to ten years (MSNBC). .
New Jersey's hate crime law is not chargeable on its own. Instead, it seeks a harsher penalty for another offense. Legal experts believe that the criminal charge of invasion of privacy already charged in this case would allow the hate crime law to be used (MNSBC). The federal hate crime law, however, is not likely to be used in this case. The federal law requires proof of intent to cause violence to the victim (Basu). .
Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. His body was identified a day after it was found (Basu). .
Many activist groups, including Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, have jumped on Clementi's suicide to draw attention to the issue at hand. Jean Marie Navetta, a spokeswoman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays commented, "To this poor kid, it's better to be dead than to have people know he's gay. Therein lies the real tragedy" (Mulvihill). Steven Goldstein, chairman of New Jersey-based Garden State Equality, who considers Clementi's death to be a hate crime, said, "We are heartbroken over the tragic loss of a young man who, by all accounts, was brilliant, talented and kind. And we are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others' lives as a sport." Dan Savage, a columnist at the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger, was motivated to launch an It Gets Better Project, a YouTube channel where gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults can retell the turmoil they lived through in their adolescent years and then show how it got better (MSNBC).