Room 30

Tyler Clementi was eighteen, a violinist from Ridgewood, New Jersey, and days before he left for Rutgers University he told his parents he was gay. At the end of August 2010 he moved into a Davidson Hall dorm room with a roommate he had never met, Dharun Ravi.

On September 19, Clementi asked to have the room to himself for the evening. Ravi slipped into Molly Wei’s room across the hall, dialed his own computer, which was set to answer automatically, and watched a few seconds of Clementi kissing another man. He tweeted about it. Two days later he told followers he planned to stream it again. Clementi saw the posts, wrote about them on a forum, asked for a room change and unplugged Ravi’s computer, so the second stream never happened. Nothing moved fast enough.

On September 22, 2010, Clementi traveled to the George Washington Bridge and jumped, leaving a short message on Facebook. Nobody was ever charged over his death. Ravi was convicted in 2012 of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation and served twenty days of a thirty-day sentence. After the New Jersey Supreme Court narrowed the bias statute in 2015, an appeals court threw out his convictions in 2016, and that October he pleaded guilty to attempted invasion of privacy. Wei was charged too, and her case ended in a pretrial diversion program with no conviction.