Serena Williams is facing a tremendous amount of backlash after comments she made about the rape victim involved in the Steubenville rape case. According to the New York Daily News, Williams spoke about the case during an interview with Rolling Stones magazine. In an excerpt of her interview, which was obtained by Deadspin, Williams asks the interviewer if he thought the boys' punishment was fair.
According to reports, the interviewer and Williams were looking at TV when something about the case came on.
"Do you think it was fair, what they got?" she asked, shaking her head. "They did something stupid, but I don't know."
The tennis superstar didn't end there.
"I'm not blaming the girl," Williams said. "But if you're a 16-year-old and you're drunk like that, you're parents should teach you: don't take drinks from other people. She's 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn't remember? It could have been a lot worse."
"She's lucky," Williams added. "Obviously I don't know, maybe she wasn't a virgin, but she shouldn't have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that's different."
Her remarks about the case and the rape victim immediately caused an uproar on Twitter with users posting that the 31-year-old shouldn't have commented on the case to begin with.
The Steubenville rape case made headlines when two star high school football players were accused of raping a 16-year-old girl when she was drunk. Trent Mays, 17, and Ma'Lik Richmond, 16, allegedly used their hands to penetrate the girl, the Daily News reports. Mays also took photos of the girl and uploaded them on social networking sites.
Mays was sentenced to two years in a juvenile correctional facility while Richmond was sentenced for a year at the same facility. Both boys, however, could remain in jail until they are 21 and could be branded as registered sex offenders.
