The videos, pictures and tweets are chilling. A picture of a girl dangling limply from the arms of two young men.

Other boys, laughingly saying the girl had to be dead because she didn't flinch as her body was violated.

An alleged rape, made into a joke.

The images and social media messages are at the heart of criminal charges against two high school football players accused of sexually assaulting an underage teenage girl during a series of end-of-summer parties in August.

Both boys are charged with rape. One also is accused of "illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material."

Their trial before an Ohio juvenile court judge is scheduled for February 13.

CNN is not identifying the girl, who is a juvenile, in accordance with its policy not to release the names of alleged rape victims.

The alleged attackers also are juveniles, but they have been identified by a judge in court, by defense attorneys and in newspapers and other media reports as Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond, both 16.

The case has attracted the attention of bloggers and even Anonymous, a loosely organized cooperative of activist hackers.

Anonymous has released information about the town and the football team and is threatening to release more unless everyone comes clean about what happened that August night.

"The town of Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected," an Anonymous member wearing the group's trademark Guy Fawkes mask says in a video posted to the group's LocalLeaks website.

The organization, he says, will not allow "a group of young men who turn to rape as a game or sport get the pass because of athletic ability or small-town luck."

The girl was assaulted the night of Saturday, August 11, and early the next morning, according to authorities.

Involved, according to authorities, were members of the Steubenville High School football team, demigods in the small, down-on-its-luck town along the banks of the Ohio River. A website dedicated to the team counts down the seconds to their return next fall.

Police got involved on August 14, when the girl's mother came forward to report the alleged assault, according to Steubenville police Chief William McCafferty. The family provided a zip drive showing a Twitter page, possibly with a photo, the chief told CNN.

A kidnapping charge was dropped by the Juvenile Court judge at a probable cause hearing last October, said McCafferty and Mays's attorney, Adam Nemann.

"My client asserts his innocence, and he looks forward to his day in court," said Nemann.

At an October hearing, attorney Walter Madison, who is representing Richmond, raised questions about the alleged victim's actions that night, according to CNN affiliate WTOV.

On August 27, the same day authorities charged the two defendants, Jefferson County authorities asked for help from the attorney general's office in investigating and prosecuting the case. Interviews and witness statements led to the arrests, McCafferty said.

"What we want is to be able to show the citizens of Jefferson County that everything that can be done in this case is being done, and if that means eliciting the help of these people from the attorney general's office, then that's what we want to do in this case," county prosecutor Jane Hanlin told WTOV at the time.

By that time, images and messages from that night had made their way around social media.

Crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, a former Steubenville resident, discovered and preserved many of the messages, at least some of which are now in the hands of authorities. She first spotted the story in the small town's newspaper and started looking into the situation on a hunch that the highly regarded football team's members were getting special treatment at the expense of the victim.

"When I first came across the article, I just felt like -- because it was involving football players, and there is a culture there that football is very important, that there was probably a little more to this story than what the local media was reporting," she told CNN Thursday. "So I started doing my own research."

One image circulated online and posted on a website maintained by Anonymous showed the girl, dressed in a T-shirt and blue shorts, her body limp, being held hand and foot by two males who appear to be teenagers.

Text messages posted to social networking sites that night seemed to brag about the incident, calling the girl "sloppy," making references to rape and suggesting even that she had been urinated on, according to Goddard. CNN has not been able to establish whether this is true.