He wasn’t just spying on his roommate, he was planning a live broadcast.
Two days after secretly catching his roommate on camera in a gay tryst, a Rutgers student tried to organize a “viewing party” so his friends could see what he saw, a classmate testified today.
Humiliation over the campus gossip surrounding his sexuality drove freshman Tyler Clementi to his suicide death, but not before his roommate Dharun Ravi sent out Twitter invitations to watch Clementi on another gay date on Ravi’s secret spy cam.
Classmate Molly Wei told jurors she learned about Ravi’s plans from other students.
“I had no idea how they knew,” said Wei, who had witnessed the first secret web cast.
“They told me about these Twitter tweets,” and that Ravi had been, “trying to have a viewing party, things like that.”
Wei was on the stand for the second day in the bias intimidation and invasion of privacy trial.
Clementi committed suicide days after the alleged spying in September 2010.
In Monday’s testimony, Wei said she watched two brief snippets of live-streamed video from Ravi’s webcam on her computer. In both, cases, she said, she saw Clementi and another man standing near Clementi’s desk kissing. In the second case, she said, their shirts were off.
She said she and Ravi initially agreed not to tell anyone about the first time they saw the footage.
“First of all, it was shocking. It felt wrong. We didn’t expect to see that. And now that what we did, it was like we shouldn’t have seen it,” Wei said in testimony Monday. “We didn’t want people to know what had happened.”
But, she said, she and Ravi soon told others about it — and she agreed to show other students.
With AP