Dear Brock Turner:
You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. However, I know of you. I know of your actions the night of January 18, 2015. I know you received a six month sentence for your actions. I know you were promised you’d be out in three months with good behavior. I know that your three months is up, and on September 2nd, you will be released, into the public eye.
You see, regardless of how you testified, you are a rapist. Regardless of what you tell yourself happened that night, you are a rapist. Regardless of how many times your parents tell news reporters you’re a “good kid”, you are a rapist.
You sexually assaulted an unconscious woman, and you were caught. You should have gotten a sentence of a minimum of 15 years. Instead, you received a sentence of three months if you were on your very best behavior.
When you raped that woman, you broke a part of her. This is not visible- this is a piece that was deep inside her. A piece that collectively held her confidence, self-image and overall worth. You, Mr. Turner, broke that the night you decided to violate her body.
Your victim wrote a letter to you- by now I’m sure you’ve read it. In it she described her body after the attack as “contaminated”, describing how awful she felt, and admitting she did not want to be in her own body anymore.
How does that feel, Mr. Turner? Knowing that, because of your selfish tendencies, this woman no longer wants to be in her own body.
Since you made sure she was extremely intoxicated the night you raped her, so she had no memory of what had happened. Your victim found out what had happened that night through a news article she read online. She learned that you had penetrated her while she was unconscious; she learned that two men had confronted you about what you were doing, which prompted you to run away, leaving her unconscious body on the cold earth; she learned when the police came, she was found curled up on the ground, in the fetal position, with her underwear inches away from her.
Do you still feel bad, Mr. Turner? I suppose not; you did, after all, cause all of this.
It is no secret many people absolutely despise you. In fact, I’ve read some of the comments that are posted underneath your mugshot on social media; there are plenty of people who wish physical harm upon you. Some have even wished you a painful death.
I do not wish death upon you, or any sort of physical harm. This is not an article where I am going to argue you deserve to be castrated, killed by putting a needle in your arm or anything of that nature. I do however, wish you the life victims of sexual assault live.
Mr. Turner, I hope your parents do not know what to say to you when you finally come home. I hope there are awkward silences surrounding your home life, as your mom and dad search for things to say, but fail to find anything because they are still thinking about you, their son, raping someone behind a dumpster.
I hope your siblings no longer look up to you, afraid that if they do, they will become you.
I hope your friends do not contact you after your release. Sure, there will be some who will. But after a while, they too will run out of things to say, their minds constantly returning to the fact that you are a rapist, and they will stop calling to make plans or showing up to hangout.
I hope people you’ve never met before ask you if you are, indeed, the Stanford rapist. I hope this happens to the point where you stop leaving your house.
I hope you lay awake at night thinking about what happened. I hope it consumes every fiber of your being, until “rapist” is the only term you think of when you think about yourself.
I hope you have a hard time looking at yourself in the mirror. I hope that when you do muster up the courage to take that quick glance, you are disappointed in what you see.
I hope that someday, when this is a story in the past, and people are concerned about other things, that you still think about it every. Single. Day.
I hope you begin to hate yourself, and I hope you never recover from that hatred.
You see Mr. Turner, this is the life you gave your victim.
She will experience silence in her life from loved ones, as they don’t know what to say.
She will stop looking at her body in the mirror, as she cannot stand to picture your hands on her body, in her body, in her hair.
She will forever be known as “the victim”, with people not knowing her real name, instead knowing what happened to her.
She will hate herself, and every inch of her body, and she will blame herself for the assault.
She will spend hours scrutinizing every action she remembers leading up to the moment you chose her as your victim, and she will come up with hundreds of scenarios, thinking maybe if she hadn’t done this, she wouldn’t have had to comb pine needles out of her hair in the hospital the next morning.
And even after it is all said and done, and she has moved on with her life, she will never stop thinking about you, and what you did to her.
Mr. Turner, this is the life victims of sexual assault live. Because of selfish people like you.
People will know who you are whenever you are in public. Your mugshot still pops up on social media time after time, news articles featuring the event still shared frequently on Facebook. Yes, people will know who you are when you go in public. And you will be known as “the kid who raped someone”.
Mr. Turner, I hope you are forever known as “the kid who raped someone”.
