CNN:

said to be devastated when his private sexual encounter with another man was secretly taped and streamed online...

I'll open by saying that, on the face of it, this is a tragic story.  There's the power differential, and the idea that a woman could be part of the bullying (for lack of a better word.)  The subtext that gay sex isn't sexy, but funny; and, of course, no matter what happened, suicide is horrible.

But while the media has clearly established the cause and the effect, it doesn't seem so clear when you follow the events.  The biggest inaccuracy is that he didn't just find out he was taped, he knew about it already.

I.

On 9/21, at 7:22 am, he writes on a message board, "so the other night..." and describes his roommate turning on a webcam, etc.  Dharun's twitter confirms the sex and the taping happened on Sunday, 9/19, between 6p and midnight.

However, he doesn't sound extremely upset; he talks about working things out with his roommate, his roommate isn't a bad guy, etc.

so the other night i had a guy over. I had talked to my roommate that afternoon and he had said it would be fine w/him. I checked his twitter today. he tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else's room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy. given the angle of the webcam I can be confident that that was all he could have seen.

so my question is what next?

I could just be more careful next time...make sure to turn the cam away...
buttt...

I'm kinda pissed at him (rightfully so I think, no?)
and idk...if I could...it would be nice to get him in trouble
but idk if I have enough to get him in trouble, i mean...he never saw anything pornographic...he never recorded anything...

I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out...and i'd probably just end up with somebody worse than him....I mean aside from being an asshole from time to time, he's a pretty decent roommate...

the other thing is I that don't wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me...

Then on 9/22, at 4:38 am-- ???-- he writes that he had asked his roommate to use the room again, but this time saw the webcam in advance.

so I wanted to have the guy over again.

I texted roomie around 7 asking for the room later tonight and he said it was fine.

when I got back to the room I instantly noticed he had turned the webcam toward my bed. And he had posted online again....saying...."anyone want a free show just video chat me tonight"...or something similar to that....

soooo after that.....

I ran to the nearest RA and set this thing in motion.....
we'll see what happens......

I haven't even seen my roommate since sunday when i was asking for the room the first time...and him doing it again just set me off....so talking to him just didn't seem like an option....

meanwhile I turned off and unplugged his computer, went crazy looking for other hidden cams....and then had a great time.

Someone writes back to him a minute later:

You may want to take a screencap of his twitter feed if you want to go the legal route just so you have some evidence of his activity.

oh haha already there baby

Then on 9/22 at 6:17am he writes

he seemed to take it seriously
he asked me to email him a written paragraph about what exactly happened...
I emailed it to him, and to two people above him...

Later that night he facebooks: "jumping off the gw bridge.  Sorry".  He apparently died around 9pm that night.

Students are already having protests at Rutgers; and we can be sure some politicians will be at some podiums.

I don't know what to make of this, but it seems to me considerably more complicated than "guy discovers he was taped and commits suicide, distraught."

Which, if it is, would mark this as another example of media distorting reality for the purpose of getting viewers, with the important consequence of social and political action resulting from a false premise.  "Statistics show that homophobia accounts for X suicides a year..."

Again, I don't know what happened, but what they say happened seems to be only a bit of the story. Maybe Rutgers finally got back to him and said, "nothing we can do"-- which makes this more about feeling abandoned than shamed.

One possibility, terrible as it may sound: what if he had wanted to attempt suicide not because he was distraught, but because it would punish his roommate?  It's not so unusual.  What if he instead chose to punish his roommate by killing him?

I am not accusing him of this and I am not even speculating that this is even true.  I am contrasting two media popular "competing narratives"  to show that what we think we know is very often what someone else wants to be true.  And once they've decided, you almost never get to change it.