It almost reads like something from a John Grisham novel.

This August, at an End of Summer Party held at the home of a volunteer football coach, students from Steubenville High, in Steubenville Ohio, started drinking.

For many, despite being underage, it was time to blow off steam before the school year started again. For one 16-year-old girl, it was the beginning of a nightmare.

She passed out from drinking, but for her the “party” did not end there. Instead, two Steubensville High football players allegedly picked her up by her wrists and ankles and proceeded to heft her dead weight to a succession of parties following that first one.

How do we know this? Because there was a lengthy and disturbing trail of posts and pictures about it on Twitter and Instagram.

“It has to suck to be that sloppy drunk girl everyone’s tweeting about right now #embarrasing” wrote one party attendee on Twitter. “Who’s this sloppy drunk bitch? #justwannaknow” wrote another.
But from there, the posts started to get more disturbing.

On Instagram, somebody posted a picture of a girl being hefted like a sack of potatoes between two muscular boys, with the comment: “Sloppy seconds.”

Somebody else Tweeted: “You don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole” and then mused “some people deserve to be peed on” – hinting at what was being done to the helpless girl.

Others, later questioned by police, recalled this unconscious girl being carried from party to party by the same two boys; who eventually stripped her naked in the process, and sexually assaulted her with their fingers in front of witnesses.

“Stop it,” one 18-year-old witness claims to have said to one of the boys, as he smacked her with his penis while she was naked and unconscious. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

“Nah, it’s alright,” was the penis waggler’s response. “Don’t worry.”

But perhaps what was more disturbing was that, aside from that one witness' tepid warning, nobody seemed motivated to stop what was going on. In fact, dozens of party goers tweeted about the naked girl, and the assault she was going through, and even snapped pictures on their phones and iPads – but nobody did anything to stop it.

“The thing I found most disturbing about this is that there were other people around when this was going on,” Police Chief William McCafferty would later admit. “Nobody had the morals to say, ‘Hey, stop it, that isn’t right.’ If you could charge people for not being decent human beings, a lot of people could have been charged that night.”

This meant that the next morning – when the girl awoke on a couch at one of the partiers’ houses – she only learned of the degradation and abuse she’d been through by discovering it, piece by piece, on the Internet.

And that’s where the story takes its Grisham-like twist. Because instead of being a cut-and-dried criminal case – a “slam dunk case” as crime analyst Alexandria Goddard described it on her blog Prinniefied – the close-knit community of Steubenville closed its ranks to protect its football team.

“The rape was just an excuse, I think,” claimed Nate Hubbard, a volunteer coach who accuses the girl of making up the stories of her alleged sexual assault and possible rape. “What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that? She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.”

Coach Reno Saccoccia, when approached by reporters to ask why he hadn’t suspended the accused players, hissed that he “didn’t do the Internet” and warned reporters nosing into the case: “You’re going to get yours. And if you don’t get yours, somebody close to you will.”

But for once, the she-said, he-said argument that torpedoes so many cases of alleged rape won’t ring true, because it wasn’t just her word against those of the town’s popular football jocks. There were pictures, video and Twitter comments to prove it.

That’s where things get complicated, because despite pictures of this poor girl lying naked, unconscious, looking like a “dead body” as one Twitter commenter suggested, there’s no actual proof of what exactly happened that night. And in typical small town fashion, the locals aren’t talking about it.

When the girl’s parents first reported the alleged rape, they took with them mountains of apparent evidence – pictures and videos and Tweets taken from the Internet chronicling the poor girl’s assault. But when the police started knocking on doors, looking for witness testimony and corroborating evidence, it was scarce.

Over 15 mobile phones and 2 iPads were confiscated from those who’d attended the parties, but by then, any incriminating pictures or videos they contained had been deleted. Only two photos of the girl – naked – were discovered, but neither showed her being sexually assaulted. They did land the device’s owner a rap for peddling child pornography, however.

Adding to the complication, by the time the police were able to examine the young victim, she’d showered any potential forensic evidence away, meaning even they couldn’t determine whether a rape had taken place or not.

To their credit – and sadly, in contrast to thousands of reported rapes every single year – they are still pursuing rape charges against the two boys who’d been documented manhandling her while naked and drunk, but the social media component makes it all that much more complicated.

Instead of supporting the case against the two boys accused of rape, however, some legal experts think the social media documentation could be twisted to support them, by using previous posts the victim made herself which were provocative and sexy to suggest she was an active participant in what defense lawyer Walter Madison describes as “at-risk behavior”...once again, putting the victim on trial, rather than the defendants.

It ultimately demonstrates how social media can skew the entire dynamic of a horrific crime, and be either a powerful tool for justice, or a dangerous weapon to maintain the status quo.