The former Rutgers University student convicted last week of spying on his gay roommate who later jumped off the George Washington Bridge spoke out for the first time Wednesday — and adamantly stuck to his decision to reject a no-jail plea deal.
“I’m never going to regret not taking the plea,” Dharun Ravi, 20, told the Newark Star-Ledger about his conviction for the bias intimidation of Tyler Clementi.
“If I took the plea, I would have had to testify that I did what I did to intimidate Tyler and that would be a lie,” he insisted.
“I won’t ever get up there and tell the world I hated Tyler because he was gay, or tell the world I was trying to hurt or intimidate him because it’s not true.”
Ravi set up a webcam to watch a tryst between Clementi and a 30-year-old man in their dorm room in September 2010.
Ravi told friends about the rendezvous and Tweeted about it. Clementi was horrified and asked the college to switch roommates.
But Ravi — who was born in India and faces deportation when he’s sentenced in May — said he only set up the spyware because of how Clementi’s date looked.
“If it was a girl who came to the room and she looked as strange as [he did], I would have done the same thing,” Ravi told the paper.
He added that when he first learned of Clementi’s disappearance from campus, he suspected the man Clementi met on the internet had something to do with it.
“I thought it was something sinister, that maybe he got mixed up with the wrong guy,” Ravi said.