We Need to Revisit the Michelle Carter Case
I heard about the Michelle Carter case in 2017, when a jury found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
In high school, Michelle met Conrad Roy, a young man from the next town. They started an online romance, exchanging thousands and thousands of text messages and calls. As the media, Roy’s parents + the prosecuting attorney tell it, the romance took a sour, and ultimately fatal, turn as Michelle — then 17 — encouraged Conrad to kill himself over many conversations. Finally, he climbed into his truck and committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. A documentary, “I Love You, Now Die”, about the case was released in 2019; while it provided some more detail, it didn’t fundamentally change the commonly accepted narrative about the case.
And it’s a narrative that desperately needs to be changed.
One of the questions I asked when I first heard about the case is what kind of family/home environment Conrad was in, especially since his family has hugely pushed Michelle’s responsibility for his death in statements to the media, on television shows, in court appearances, and in an activist capacity. Roy’s grandfather has said: “If you ask me, she is not a good person. The sentence was too lenient; 15 months is nothing to a lifetime with my grandson." His mother had said “I don’t believe she has a conscience,” and filed a civil suit against Michelle following her conviction, seeking 4.2 million dollars in damages - it was dismissed. Roy’s mother has has also worked extensively to get “Conrad’s Law” into place in Massachusetts; this law would make it crime to “coerce” someone experiencing suicide ideation to kill themselves. She’s said that this would honor her son, even though he left behind a loving note to Michelle saying: “I love you and greatly appreciate your effort and kindness toward me. Keep your heart beating and keep pushing forward.” It’s hard to imagine that trying Michelle with involuntary manslaughter, suing her, then pushing a new bill criminalizing her behavior was in line with his wishes or honoring his memory.
In any situation where adults are trying to push blame for something onto teens, it raises a big red flag for me: what defines the teenager’s experience is, in the vast majority of cases, the power and control of the adults around them; the teen’s experience is massively controlled and moderated by the school system, parents + adult family members, etc. This system is often abusive and results in myriad tragic outcomes for youth.
“I Love You, Now Die” briefly touched on one reason why Conrad’s family might have been so eager to blame Michelle for the death: domestic violence. In one instance, Conrad’s father beat him so badly he got a concussion; in another, his mother was accused of hitting his father in front of the family. In both instances, police were called. The documentary notes that Conrad further was suffering from PTSD symptoms -- on a daily basis -- from the domestic violence in the home.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!!? How did a teen girl’s texts become more important to this case than the fact that Conrad’s dad was beating the shit out of him to the point of causing brain injury?!?!?
The fact that Conrad’s family was the site of serial domestic violence should have been a huge factor in this case. It’s been proven that youth’s exposure to interpersonal violence increases suicidality. Family violence, even though 22% of children are physically abused, is massively covered up both by the family system and in broader society; it is one of the silent systems of abuse, usually considered a “family matter”, “their business”, etc. So even though there were multiple police reports, neither the court case or any of the media reports have focused on this “detail.”
Hmmm.
Indeed, if there was some need to make Conrad’s death the subject of blameful inquiry, there were many other places to look, even beyond the domestic violence in the home. This case is a helluva lot more complex than prosecutors, the victim’s family and the media want you to believe. For one, both Michelle and Conrad were suicidally depressed, and had discussed killing themselves in tandem, ala Romeo and Juliet. Conrad had had four prior suicide attempts. Both teens were on psychiatric medication for mental illness; particularly among the youth, antidepressants are black-labelled for increasing suicidality. Going further, we have a known crisis in mental health care in this country, yet no attention was paid to how the system failed Conrad in this instance, as it fails other young people and teens more broadly.
Even if the focus had to be on Michelle, there’s so much to discuss here, like treatment-interfering relationships; how teenagers still have developing brains and can struggle to distinguish fantasy from reality; and the concept of suicidality and self-harm as a contagious phenomenon. There’s also evidence to suggest that Conrad had had multiple relationships with other mentally ill girls, bringing up questions like: even so young, why do boys and men turn to girls and women for emotional support? At what point does this cross the line into emotional abuse? The documentary touched briefly on how Conrad constantly threatened suicide, negged Michelle, and engaged in other questionable behaviors that deserve to be examined before we got to the point of court cases and society-wide condemnation.
Literally all of these very pertinent and real issues got submerged under the national sport of attacking teen girls. The misogyny, depersonalization and hatred that has been aimed at Michelle is absolutely deluded, ravenous, and disgusting, and demonstrates just how much we absolutely loathe teen girls and seek to punish, jail, abuse, violate and scapegoat them. She has been called every name under the sun: A devil, a demon, a psycho, a sociopath, Satan, sick and twisted. People have said she deserves to rot in jail and then in hell. People have said that she doesn’t deserve to live. That she has no soul, no heart and no conscious: that she is a cold-hearted predator, a piece of shit. When the guilty verdict came down, there was pure glee tempered only by regret that the sentence didn’t go to the extremes of life in prison, or, get this: the death penalty.
Here, we see the obvious hypocrisy of the publicity storm around the case: this was never about caring for young lives. If people cared so much about keeping mentally ill and suicidal teenagers alive, they wouldn’t be advocating for the death penalty for them. If people cared so much about suicide victims and suicide prevention, why was no one concerned that Michelle, a depressed and suicidal teenager who had lost her boyfriend to suicide and was now facing jail, might kill herself? Especially considering that people who lose a loved one to suicide are more likely to attempt suicide and female prisoners are at least 9x more likely to die from suicide than the general population.
In reality, this case wasn’t about Michelle and what she did or didn’t do. It was about scapegoating a teen girl for the infinitely complex case of a tragic suicide; it was about using the ravenous misogyny we have for teen girls to cover up systemic issues like insufficient mental health care for our youth; it was about the family secret of domestic violence and how families and society will go to any length to protect it.
And THAT is the narrative we need to be exploring.