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Roll Red Roll
Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland
Description
**A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection**
An incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change.
Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman spent four years embedded in the town, documenting the case and its reverberations. Ten years after the assault, Roll Red Roll is the culmination of that research, weaving in new interviews and personal reflections to take readers beyond Steubenville to examine rape culture in everything from sports to teen dynamics. Roll Red Roll explores the factors that normalize sexual assault in our communities. Through inter-views with sportswriter David Zirin, victim’s rights attorney Gloria Allred and more, Schwartzman untangles the societal norms in which we too often sacrifice our daughters to protect our sons. With the Steubenville case as a flashpoint that helped spark the #MeToo movement, a decade later, Roll Red Roll focuses on the perpetrators and asks, can our society truly change?
Praise
**One of the New York Times' "Books to Read in July"**
"It’s the grim ordinariness of the Steubenville rape case... that shines through most brightly in Nancy Schwartzman’s Roll Red Roll. A meticulous account of the 'first rape case ever to go viral in the United States,' the book moves from the facts of one summer night in Rust Belt Ohio into a broader reckoning with American masculinity and the emerging influence of the internet on sexual assault cases. Schwartzman clearly conveys the brutal banality of what happened in that town, the way rape culture, victim blaming and institutional complicity are the rule rather than the exception in American communities. Steubenville could be anywhere.
"Schwartzman’s compassionate attention to these figures renders her depiction of their moral failures all the more damning: These are human beings, otherwise capable of responsibility and empathy, who did not manage to show these traits to Jane Doe."
—Moira Donegan, The New York Times Book Review"A scathing examination of American rape culture, promoted and abetted by athletics....A maddening, well-documented account of crime without punishment even as violence against women continues unabated."
—Kirkus Reviews"Roll Red Roll is a great read."
—Lake County Examiner
