Michael Nodianos: The Video, Why He Wasn’t Charged, and After

Michael Nodianos is the former Steubenville High School student who became nationally known in January 2013 after a roughly 12-minute video surfaced showing him laughing and joking about the rape of an incapacitated 16-year-old girl at a series of parties in Steubenville, Ohio, the previous August. He was not present during the assault and was never charged with a crime, but the footage drew international outrage, pushed him out of Ohio State University, and became one of the defining artifacts of the Steubenville rape case.¹

What the Video Showed

The recording was made between roughly 2:00 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. on August 12, 2012, in the hours after the parties where the assault occurred.² Nodianos had graduated from Steubenville High School earlier that year and was a freshman studying electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University on an academic scholarship.³

In the footage, he repeatedly referred to the victim as a “dead girl” and gave what appeared to be graphic descriptions of the rape, drawing comparisons to the film “Pulp Fiction” and to the Mike Tyson rape case. He said the victim was “deader than Trayvon Martin” and declared, “They peed on her, that’s how you know she’s dead.” When an off-camera voice told him the remarks were not funny and asked, “What if that was your daughter?” Nodianos responded: “But it isn’t. If that was my daughter I wouldn’t care, I’d just let her be dead.” Another voice can be heard warning that people could go to jail if the video got around.¹

The video was taken offline shortly after it first appeared. It was obtained and reposted by the hacker collective Anonymous in late December 2012 or early January 2013, at which point it went viral.⁴

Why He Was Never Charged

Nodianos was not a defendant in the Steubenville rape case. His attorney, Dennis McNamara, said he was not at the house where the assault took place and learned about it from other students shortly afterward while he had been drinking.⁴ McNamara stated that Nodianos had “no involvement in the criminal case or in any of the underlying activity” that led to charges against Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the two Steubenville High School football players later convicted of rape. He was not a suspect, was not subpoenaed, and was not asked to testify at either the trial or the grand jury that followed.⁵

McNamara acknowledged there was “no excuse or justification” for the comments and attributed them to “youth and drunkenness,” saying Nodianos was “ashamed and embarrassed” and “sincerely regrets his behavior and his comments and the effect that it’s had on the parties involved, including his own family.”⁵

Advocacy groups pressed for charges anyway. A January 2013 petition organized by Choice USA and UltraViolet gathered 70,000 signatures demanding a broader investigation of everyone involved in or aware of the assault, including bystanders.⁶ In March 2013, the Ohio chapter of the National Organization for Women delivered more than 85,000 signatures to Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine specifically seeking Nodianos’s arrest, arguing that he had violated Ohio Revised Code 2921.22, the state’s failure-to-report-a-felony statute, a fourth-degree misdemeanor.⁷

DeWine met with the protesters but declined. He drew a distinction between criminal behavior and conduct that was merely reprehensible, saying: “There is a difference between what is a criminal violation and what is obnoxious, or otherwise immoral.” He said the state’s investigation was focused on those directly culpable for the crime and that Nodianos had not been singled out.⁷

Leaving Ohio State

Public reaction to the video was severe and personal. Nodianos deactivated his Twitter and Facebook accounts.² A Facebook group calling for his expulsion from Ohio State gathered more than 3,000 supporters within days.³ According to his attorney, hackers accessed email and social media accounts belonging to Nodianos and his relatives, the family changed their phone numbers, and people attempted to track down his class schedule and appeared at his dormitory looking for him.⁵

Ohio State confirmed that he was no longer enrolled as of January 7, 2013, having attended only through fall semester final exams, which ended on December 12, 2012.² McNamara described the departure as the result of “insurmountable distraction” and said the family hoped Nodianos could eventually return to college. The attorney noted that his academic scholarship would be honored if he chose to come back.³

The Underlying Crime

Although the video is often conflated with the rape itself, Nodianos was not the attacker. On the night of August 11 into the early morning of August 12, 2012, a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted during a series of end-of-summer parties in Steubenville. Prosecutors established that Trent Mays, then 17, and Ma’lik Richmond, then 16, each digitally penetrated the victim while she was too intoxicated to consent.⁸ The victim later testified that she woke up naked on a couch in an unfamiliar house, missing her underwear, earrings, and phone, and that she learned details of her assault from social media posts she saw afterward.⁹

Both Mays and Richmond were tried as juveniles in a bench trial before visiting Judge Thomas Lipps. On March 17, 2013, both were found delinquent, the juvenile-court equivalent of guilty, on rape charges; Mays was also convicted of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material for distributing a nude photograph of the victim. Richmond received a minimum of one year in a juvenile correctional facility, Mays a minimum of two.⁸¹⁰

What Became of Him

After withdrawing from Ohio State in January 2013, Nodianos largely disappeared from public view. He was never charged, never testified, and no civil lawsuits naming him have been identified in reporting on the case.

The video continued to circulate. The 2018 documentary Roll Red Roll, directed by Nancy Schwartzman, examined the Steubenville case through police interrogation footage, social media recreations, and interviews, and featured the Nodianos recording prominently. One review described it as the documentary’s “apex” and called it part of a “comprehensive account of apathy.”¹¹ Legal scholars have also pointed to the Steubenville case, and to the demands for Nodianos’s arrest, as a prominent example of bystanders avoiding consequences under “Bad Samaritan” and duty-to-report statutes. Ohio Revised Code 2921.22, the law advocacy groups wanted used against him, has been amended several times since, though no direct causal link to the Steubenville events has been established in the reporting.¹²

1
CBS News. Video Depicts Teens Laughing About Alleged Sexual Assault Victim
2
Cleveland.com. Steubenville Rape Case Video
3
The Lantern. Ohio State Distances Itself From Recent Steubenville Rape Case Controversy
4
CNN. Ohio Steubenville Alleged Rape Case
5
CBS News. Steubenville Rape Case: Student in Online Video Leaves Ohio State
6
Los Angeles Times. Steubenville Rape Case Petition
7
The Lantern. 85K Call for Arrest of Former Ohio State Student in Steubenville Rape Case
8
CNN. Steubenville Rape Case
9
BBC Three. Steubenville Rape Case
10
Christian Science Monitor. Ohio Rape Case: Teens Found Guilty, Face Year-Plus in Jail
11
Slate. Roll Red Roll Is an Essential Documentary About the Steubenville Rape Case
12
Ohio Legislative Service Commission. Section 2921.22