How Incredibly Sad

There is a story here in the local papers about a 14-year-old girl that filed Statutory Rape charges against an 18-year-old boy at her school. The police were investigating the case and charges were filed against the young man. It soon became public and the 14-year-old child was interviewed on television. She gave her side of the story, with her identity hidden and, though there’s no way to know if she was telling the truth, sounded pretty credible. I don’t pretend to know much about the case, didn’t really pay much attention to it, shame on me. My natural assumption was that this guy forced himself on this child and that he was nothing but garbage. Well, it turns out, there was, and is, so much more to the story.

There are always three sides to every story. The first of which is what we’ve heard on the news. The third is the fact that this poor kid hung herself earlier this week and a young life ended far too soon. The second side of the story is more confusing than one could imagine. I’m pasting a story from today’s Free Press into this post for all to see. It’s an opinion piece, yet gives us all a better view into the events that took place.

Teen's life too short -- and too public
BY BRIAN DICKERSON
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Under Michigan law, it is illegal to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, even if she consents.

But there's no law against broadcasting on television the same 14-year-old's account of her sexual activity. And that's a shame, because if there were such a law, Samantha Kelly might still be alive today.
Late on Sept. 26, Samantha's mother, June Justice, told Huron Township police that her daughter, a freshman at Huron High School, admitted having sexual intercourse with Joseph Tarnopolski, an 18-year-old senior who lived eight homes down the road from theirs.
In a handwritten statement and two separate interviews conducted outside her mother's presence, Samantha said she and Tarnopolski had sex for two hours one morning while Tarnopolski's parents were away. She admitted telling Tarnopolski that she was anxious to lose her virginity. Police later found text message exchanges supporting the two teenagers' accounts that their sexual encounter had been consensual.
Those accounts, coupled with the fact that Samantha was too young to consent legally to sexual contact with anyone, gave prosecutors the grounds to charge Tarnopolski with third-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison and 25 years on Michigan's public sex offender registry.
Fox 2's version of the story
These would surely qualify as seismic events in the lives of any two teenagers. But for Samantha Kelly and Joseph Tarnopolski, things were about to get much worse.
In early October, distressed by the hostility her daughter faced at school from Tarnopolski and his friends, June Justice contacted Detroit's Fox News affiliate, WJBK-TV (Channel 2). On Oct. 18, the station broadcast a 21/2-minute segment in which Samantha, accompanied on-screen by her mother, charged for the first time that Tarnopolski had forced himself on her. An anchor's introduction to the piece called it a case of rape.
The issue of coercion was irrelevant to the statutory charge prosecutors had lodged against Tarnopolski. But the Channel 2 broadcast complicated the case in two ways.
First, it introduced a new version of events inconsistent with both Samantha's previous accounts and her text messages to the defendant.
Second, it turned what had been a closely held secret into general knowledge among the 850 students at Huron High. Many sided with Tarnopolski, a popular upperclassman who vehemently denied Samantha's allegations of coercion and branded his accuser a liar.
Where were grown-ups?
Wednesday, a day after Samantha hanged herself in her family's home, June Justice charged that the taunting and bullying her daughter had endured in the last three weeks had directly precipitated her suicide. But that's hardly the whole story.
Surely, Samantha's decision to go public with her allegations -- supported by her mother and abetted by Fox 2 journalists -- left the 14-year-old dramatically more exposed to criticism and ridicule. The WJBK segment blurred Samantha's face, but the station broadcast clear video images of Tarnopolski, Justice and Huron High, and identified all three by name. The segment's prime-time airing ended both Samantha's anonymity and her alleged attacker's interest in keeping his own version of events to himself.
Then there was the new charge of coercion. Prosecutors frankly doubted the revised account Samantha had provided in the WJBK broadcast, and warned that they would not abet any attempt to exaggerate the circumstances of her encounter with Tarnopolski in his preliminary examination, which was scheduled for Wednesday.
It's reasonable to conclude that Samantha knew she was in for a humiliating experience if Tarnopolski's lawyers were permitted to cross-examine her. She knew she'd be asked to reconcile the differences between the account she had given prosecutors and the one she gave for TV. Had she simply neglected to mention in those initial interviews that she had been forcibly raped? Or had she embellished her account after some of her peers questioned her decision to press charges?
That's how it was bound to go down on the witness stand: Was she lying then -- or lying now?
The end of the world
Any adult would shrink from such an experience. To a 14-year-old, it must have looked like the end of the world -- and for Samantha Kelly, it was.
In court Wednesday, after the charges against Tarnopolski were dismissed, June Justice railed at the high school peers who taunted her daughter.
"All them peers really need to think now, more than they ever have before, what they did," she said. "I want to know how they're sleeping."
But teenagers didn't put a 14-year-old freshman in front of a TV camera and broadcast her teenage angst to the world.


There’s really not much more to say after reading this. Yes, schoolyard taunting had a great deal to do with this and we should all pay attention to it. we’re reading and hearing far too many stories related to it. it’s that second side to the story that makes me wonder even more about where we, as a society, have gone. It’s all such a shame on so many levels.