Here is what was on them.
A girl named Priya Anand had been recording since Brody crossed the gym floor, because — and she said this in a written statement — "he does this and somebody should have it."
Her video is two minutes and eleven seconds.
It has "kneel down and apologize" in clear audio.
It has me saying "please move," twice, both times audible.
It has, at 1:41, a moment nobody in that gym noticed and which changed the entire proceeding: Brody looks over his shoulder at the equipment room door, checks that Ms. Prather is still inside, and then turns back and steps in.
That's what a lawyer calls consciousness of wrongdoing and what everybody else calls checking if a teacher's watching.
And there was a second thing, which came out of the ninth video and which had nothing to do with me.
A boy named Emmanuel Reyes had recorded eleven seconds of a completely different day, three weeks earlier, in the C hallway.
Different kid. A sophomore named Wes Doerr. Same circle, same tone, same demand — apologize — and Wes Doerr had gotten down on the floor.
Wes Doerr transferred out of Halstead in November. His family had filed a complaint with the school in October.
That complaint existed. Solange requested the discipline file through the proper channel and the district produced it, because they had to.
There were three prior complaints against Brody Cade in twenty-six months. Two had been resolved with what the file called "a conversation with the coaching staff." One had no recorded outcome at all.
The name that appeared on all three as the responding administrator was the athletic director, not the assistant principal.
I want to say clearly what I think happened there, and it's less sinister than people wanted it to be.
I don't believe anybody at Halstead sat in a room and decided to protect a linebacker. I believe that when a complaint came in about a kid the coaches liked, it got handled by the coaches, and handling it meant a conversation, and a conversation meant nothing was written down, and nothing being written down meant the next complaint was also the first one.
That's not a conspiracy. That's just what happens when the person who wants an outcome is also the person who decides the outcome.
The hearing was in March.
I was not exonerated and I want that extremely clear, because a lot of the retellings have me walking out vindicated with a soundtrack.
The hearing officer found that the first strike was defensive and justified.
He found that the second strike, delivered after Brody Cade was disabled and while he was rising, was not proportionate, and that my training was a relevant factor in assessing what a reasonable response was.
He was right. I've had five years to argue with that finding and I've never been able to.
I got: expulsion reduced to a long-term suspension, forty hours of community service, a conflict-resolution program, and a requirement to complete the semester through the district's online program.
Brody got a long-term suspension too, plus he was removed from athletics for the remainder of the year, which in March of a senior year meant the offer from Missouri went away.
Marcus Whitlock dropped the civil threat in April, two weeks after Solange sent him Priya Anand's video and the three prior complaints.
There was no criminal charge. The district attorney's office looked at it for about nine days and declined.
❤️ The part that actually ruined that spring wasn't the hearing. Drop a comment and I'll finish this. 💭
PART 4
It was the internet.
I need to describe what that was like because I was seventeen and I had never had anybody look at me on purpose.
Four million views in a week. Then the reposts. Then the news segment. Then a men's rights account and a self-defense account and a fitness account and about nine hundred people in the comments explaining who I was.
The kind ones were worse than the cruel ones. I know how that sounds.
The cruel ones called me an animal and said I'd sucker-punched a guy. Fine. I could carry that.
The kind ones made me into a symbol, and the symbol was a girl who had waited quietly for years for the perfect moment to be admired, and that girl does not exist and never did. I was a kid in a hoodie who had spent two years hoping nobody would look at her, and four million people made me the exact opposite of the only thing I wanted.
I deleted every account I had in the first week and I have not had one since. I'm twenty-two now.
My mother got a call at her work. Somebody had found where she cleaned. She was told, by a very apologetic supervisor, that they'd had complaints and it would be better if she took the Riverside building instead.