For anyone with a conscience, the storyline is sadly familiar: A young white man from a well-off family, this time a swimmer at Stanford University named Brock Turner, rapes a woman and is barely punished because, well, drinking was involved and, you know, his life shouldn’t be ruined.
On Thursday, a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to just six months in jail after being convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault — because a harsher sentence would have had a “severe impact” on Turner. He could have been sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In a particularly nauseating defense, Turner’s father, Dan Turner, said his son should not be harshly punished because it would be “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.”
The victim in this case should not have had to speak out. But, bravely, she has — to say: No more.
No more blaming alcohol. (Most people drink responsibly without sexually assaulting someone.) No more asking questions about what a victim was wearing. (Rape isn’t about attraction but, often, an inflated sense of power over others.) No more minimizing a crime because the perpetrator swims fast. (As if a judge would let a burglar off easy because he was a fast runner.)
In January 2015, two Swedish students biking across the Stanford campus came across Turner thrusting his body upon a nearly naked, unconscious woman behind a dumpster after a party at a nearby fraternity. Turner ran but was tackled by one of the students.
His victim woke up on a hospital gurney, pine needles in her hair and dirt and abrasions in her vagina. She was unconscious when she was assaulted.
The injury didn’t end there. The judge’s statements and sentencing decision were so egregious, a recall challenge is now being organized. Nearly 258,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to remove him from the bench because he “failed to see that the fact that Brock Turner is a white male star athlete at a prestigious university does not entitle him to leniency.”
The injury continued in the media. News reports of the case mentioned the victim’s blood alcohol level. They often shared details of Turner’s swim scholarship and Olympic aspirations; one report described his “stunning fall from grace.”
It’s the victim’s words you need to hear. She read a lengthy statement, rebutting Turner’s claims, published by BuzzFeed last week. Her words are a call to action. Stop the double standard: One for the victim, another for the perpetrator.
The judicial system ignored her voice. We cannot:
“You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again. You knocked down both our towers, I collapsed at the same time you did. If you think I was spared, came out unscathed, that today I ride off into sunset, while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. Nobody wins. We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering. Your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.
“See, one thing we have in common is that we were both unable to get up in the morning. I am no stranger to suffering. You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was ‘unconscious intoxicated woman’, ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.”
