http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/nyregion/dharun-ravi-wrote-of-wanting-to-keep-gays-away.html?_r=1&ref=homosexuality
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A former Rutgers University student sent a message to a friend about wanting to “keep the gays away” and urged her to watch a feed from a webcam that he had trained on a bed where he expected his roommate to have a tryst with another man, according to text messages shown in court on Monday.
“Do it,” the former student, Dharun Ravi, told his friend Michelle Huang in a message on Sept. 21, 2010. “I have it pointed at his bed and the monitor is off so he can’t see you.”
The next day, the roommate, Tyler Clementi, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Mr. Ravi is now on trial on charges including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, accused of spying on Mr. Clementi as he had sexual encounters with another man. Mr. Ravi is not charged with causing Mr. Clementi’s death.
Mr. Ravi said in a text message to Ms. Huang, whom he had known since high school, that through his webcam he had seen Mr. Clementi being intimate with a man he described as “older and creepy and definitely from the Internet.”
That man, a 30-year-old known publicly only by his initials, M.B., testified on Friday that he did meet Mr. Clementi online. Upon visiting him in his dorm room, M.B. said, he noticed a webcam pointing at him from atop Mr. Ravi’s desktop computer.
Prosecutors say Mr. Ravi initially used his webcam to spy on Mr. Clementi from a computer in a neighboring dorm room on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010, and tried to do it again two days later after Mr. Clementi again asked to have their room to himself.
In a text message, Mr. Ravi told Ms. Huang: “I got so creeped out after Sunday.” Ms. Huang suggested that Mr. Clementi and his date might use Mr. Ravi’s bed, and Mr. Ravi replied, “My webcam checks my bed, hahaha.”
He then wrote, “Yeah, keep the gays away.”
Mr. Ravi told Ms. Huang that his webcam was set to “automatically accept” whenever anyone tried to view its feed from another computer.
“I tested it and it works,” Mr. Ravi wrote. “Be careful it could get nasty.”
When a prosecutor, Julia McClure, asked Ms. Huang what she understood Mr. Ravi to have meant, she testified that she believed that the webcam feed would show “a man with another man.” Ms. Huang had referred in text messages to Mr. Ravi’s “gay roomie” and asked, “Did you really see him make out with some guy?”
A defense lawyer, Steven Altman, called Ms. Huang’s memory into question after she answered yes when he asked if some of the testimony she gave police investigators in January was “impacted by what you read in the newspaper.” The defense has maintained that Mr. Ravi checked his webcam out of fear that Mr. Clementi’s guest might steal some of his property, not because he was biased against gay men.
In his exchange of text messages with Ms. Huang on that Tuesday, Mr. Ravi alluded to having told others about his webcam.
“People are having a viewing party with a bottle of Bacardi and beer in this kid’s room for my roommate,” Mr. Ravi said.
On the Wednesday, Ms. Huang sent a message to Mr. Ravi asking what had happened the previous night. Mr. Ravi replied, “It got messed up and didn’t work.”
That Thursday afternoon, Mr. Ravi told Ms. Huang in a text message that he had learned that Mr. Clementi had committed suicide.
“He was quiet all the time and had no friends,” Mr. Ravi wrote. “So I guess it makes sense.”
Mr. Ravi also wrote, “I’m at home now till it blows over.”
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