The Story that Matters
Aaron Blanton made a video in his living room that has almost 10 million views. But that’s not what he wants to talk about.
By Brooke Jackson-Glidden
When CNN called Aaron Blanton and asked him for an interview, the young filmmaker had to savor the irony.
Blanton, a blond-haired smile with a top hat, had just watched his 26-second anti-rape video go viral, and now, every news outlet wanted a piece of him and his partner, Samantha Stendal. What the 24-hour news giant didn’t know was that Blanton and Stendal came up with the idea watching CNN’s Steubenville Rape coverage.
In 2013, two Ohio teens were sentenced to a year in prison after assaulting a teenage girl passed out at a party, filming it and posting the footage on Twitter. The story garnered national coverage after countless internet trolls and townsfolk sent the victim and her family hundreds of death threats and several months’ worth of hate mail. During the sentencing, CNN aired a six-minute segment with two anchors in the studio, a reporter in the field and a separate analyst.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it, Candy,” CNN reporter Poppy Harlow said. “It was incredibly emotional, incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures — star football players, very good students — we literally watched as, they believe, their life fell apart.”
Blanton was floored.
“It was amazing! The fact CNN – that even one person in that room – thought to take it from that angle, let alone everyone, and then that they talked about it, and it made it on air… it’s astonishing.” Blanton rubs his head, still struck by the memory. “Oh, and by the way – never mentioned the victim. Never! In the entire segment! And then it ended!”
After watching the CNN story, Blanton called 19-year-old Stendal so she could watch the piece. Similarly outraged, the fellow University of Oregon student called Blanton back that evening and said, “I have an idea.”
In the video, a college-aged man (Justin Rabier-Gotchall, “the broiest friend we have”) turns on a camera. He adjusts the lens so it captures the scene behind him: A woman, passed out on the couch after a party.
“Guess what I’m gonna do to her?” Rabier-Gotchall asks.
He covers the woman’s body with a blanket, places a glass of water next to her head, turns her on her side. When he’s finished, he returns to the camera.
“Real men treat women with respect.”
Blanton and Stendal filmed the video in his living room, finishing the shoot within an hour. The two edited the footage in a University lab a few days later. When they posted the video on Stendal’s YouTube account, at around 1 a.m. that night, Blanton offhandedly stuck the link on the Upworthy Facebook page. Upworthy, a website dedicated to sharing activist art and videos, posted the video on their site and Facebook page. In the following 48 hours, the video was shared over a million times.
A local-area news station, KVAL, called Blanton and Stendal first. The University of Oregon student paper followed, then NPR, then CNN, then news organizations around the globe. Vogue Paris spoke to Stendal in a phone interview, and NPR covered the video several different times. But of all the interviews he did, Aaron enjoyed the KVAL piece most.
“Over the course of this whole thing blowing up, the focus on the vast majority of the news stories was ‘College students grab a camera, make this thing for no money, millions of people watch it. PS: Yay, don’t rape people, isn’t that great.’ And we thought it was so much more of a complex issue than that.” Blanton said.
When KVAL first interviewed Blanton, they had a similar angle. The reporters visited Blanton’s house, sat on the couch where the clip took place and talked to him about the experience of watching the video go viral. At the end, Blanton’s girlfriend gave him a look. He had spent many evenings complaining about the fluff coverage of the video. So this time, he spoke up.
“You know, I just really want to thank you guys,” Blanton said to the reporters. “Thank you for not doing yet another human interest piece about college kids making a viral video. It really is an important thing, and it’s something that we need to talk about. We really appreciate getting attention so we can talk about the issues.”
The reporter looked at Blanton, at the cameraman and back at Blanton. He smiled, and his eyes lit up.
“You know what?” he said to Blanton. “Let’s do it again.”
KVAL aired a 13-minute segment on rape on campus from the perspective of the video. The two journalists spent another 40 minutes on the couch where the video was made, and the three men talked about sexual assault, about women, about what it is real men do.
When Blanton was on CNN, he stared into two paper eyes taped to a camera in an almost empty studio. He and Stendal answered faceless questions whispered from earbuds, questions like, “We’re you surprised that the video went viral?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
Blanton is now editing footage at his desk in the Harvard X headquarters, where he works as the video editor for Poetry in America X, an online video series produced by the university. But this footage isn’t for Harvard, it’s of Harvard. Blanton has been shooting for a documentary on campus sexual assault directed by Kirby Dick, the Oscar-nominated director behind The Invisible War. He’s reviewing a clip of a Final Club man leading a woman into a basement.
When Blanton was in Oregon, he met a woman named Annie E. Clark, a writer for the Huffington Post and founder of the nonprofit End Rape on Campus. Clark was a subject in Dick’s latest project, which will premiere at Sundance this year. She connected Blanton with the director, who asked Blanton to film Clark and her friend and partner, Andrea Pino, as they battled University administration in an effort to find a voice in the fight against sexual assault.
“I have learned a lot about what it means to be a victim of sexual assault in terms of trying to go through the appropriate channels to seek justice,” he said. “And it’s awful.”
Blanton grew up in Eugene, Oregon, a liberal enclave in the Pacific Northwest, where he acted and directed in high school plays before attending the University of Oregon for Cinema Studies.
“I was also in the School of Journalism and Communication,” he said with a frown, “But I didn’t get a degree…”
He probably didn’t need one. Blanton and Stendal won a Peabody Award for their video, “A Needed Response,” alongside PBS’s documentary How to Survive a Plague and the WBZ coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. The Peabody Awards celebrate “stories that matter,” often in the form of documentaries and news coverage. “A Needed Response” was the first viral video to win a Peabody Award.
Blanton woke up to the phone ringing on the day he heard the news. He answered a call from Jeffrey Jones, the director of the Peabody Awards.
“You’ve probably been getting calls all morning!” Jones said.
“Mmph, nope.” Blanton wasn’t exactly awake at this moment.
He listened to the congratulations, the instructions for the award ceremony, and listened as the director drawled, “That was a damn fine piece.”
But Blanton knew the piece was good before the Peabody committee told him so. He knew the video did its job when he began sifting through the YouTube comments.
“The most gratifying and important thing, by far more than the press, more than the Peabody, more than anything, was watching the Youtube comments,” Blanton said. “There were all these trolls, but there were just as many people saying, ‘No, this is important, this is exactly what is wrong with our society.’ I haven’t seen that on any other YouTube video ever. That’s just so cool. The video did what it was supposed to do.”
We can take comfort in the fact Blanton did the same.
