Catch up with Reyna Garcia, the student behind the 2009 video that got hundreds of thousands of hits

Reyna Garcia ‘11 walks into Roble Library wearing shorts and a “Beat Cal” shirt. At quick glance, she looks just like any other student. You would never guess that in April 2009, she filmed a video of Condoleezza Rice that got more than 360,000 hits and 3,000 comments on YouTube.

The video captures on film a student reception for political science Prof. Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state. As a group of protestors demonstrated outside Roble Hall, the location of the event, Garcia videotaped Rice defending the use of interrogation techniques under the Bush administration.

Garcia admits she never expected the video to skyrocket in popularity as it did.

“At first I just thought I would e-mail it to the dorm list because some people missed the event and were kind of wondering what went on,” Garcia said. “I just kind of e-mailed it out to the dorm and to TYT [The Young Turks] too because I follow them.”

Soon after posting the video on YouTube, Garcia received e-mails and phone calls from major news networks.

“A lot of them just wanted the original footage, but some wanted interesting quotes or more information about the event or more about me or more about the people asking questions,” she said. “There was a NBC story that I was on. I was on TYT, The Young Turks. They were the ones that originally posted to Huffington Post, which is where they picked up the story. Once it got on Huffington Post it really exploded.”

At the time, Garcia’s video was the most well-documented instance of Rice engaging students in back-and-forth conversation on controversial topics. It was also Rice’s first publicized response at Stanford to interrogation techniques used during the Bush presidency.

Luckily for viewers, Garcia believes she managed to get the most interesting part of the night on video.

“I was there for most of the reception,” Garcia said. “She was just making the rounds with the students. [Taking the video] was just kind of impromptu and everyone had their cameras because we were there taking pictures. Everyone was invited to bring their cameras for pictures.”

Rice and Garcia have not spoken since the YouTube video gained national attention.

When asked for a comment for this story, staff in Rice’s office replied that they were too busy because of her book tour.

Garcia expressed interest in conversing one-on-one with Rice in the future, particularly on the decisions Rice made while in office.

“I would definitely want to perhaps press on the torture issue and why she is so adamant about sticking to the position of waterboarding not being torture,” Garcia said.

Although she has received supportive feedback from friends, family and even strangers, Garcia acknowledged that not all the responses to her YouTube video have been positive.

“Anonymous people on YouTube send hateful e-mails every once in a while,” she said. “Often they go on very personal attacks towards me or the other students who were asking the questions, and that was the hardest thing to deal with at first. But I realized I don’t need to worry about what they think about me, especially since I don’t know them…I still get some hate mail even today from random people on YouTube.”

Garcia hopes that the very real possibility of negative backlash will not discourage other professors or people of Rice’s stature from discussing contentious issues with students.

“I mean, people like Dr. Rice, they’re public figures…that’s kind of the response her staff gave after the event,” Garcia said. “They know that what they say is subject to response. I would hope that that wouldn’t make them nervous.”

Garcia, a Los Angeles native, will graduate this spring to an undecided future. Currently in the process of applying to jobs and graduate schools, she likes to think that the Rice incident won’t dampen her prospects.

“I would hope it wouldn’t really affect anyone’s opinion of me,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone would want to take the time to Google me. That seems kind of random.”

In any case, Garcia has taken away an important lesson from the Rice-YouTube experience: students have every right to engage in open dialogue with visiting speakers.

“Just take advantage of the fact that Stanford does offer you the opportunity to interact with people such as Condoleezza Rice and other important heads of states or former heads of states on campus,” she said.