Dear Dan Turner,
As you are keenly aware, in the morning hours of January 17, 2015, your Elf-on-the-Shelf-looking college freshman son with a promising future ahead of him as a scholar athlete at Stanford University took advantage of a young woman who had unintentionally consumed more alcohol than her body could appropriately process. She was so incapacitated that she was unaware of what had happened that night until she read about it in the newspaper. Your son, on the other hand, had consumed less alcohol and was alert enough to run away like a dog with its tail between its legs when passersby attacked him for the disgusting act he was committing to this poor young woman.
Congratulations, you bred a rapist.
There's no mincing words here. Brock Turner is not a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Brock is not a misunderstood little boy. Brock is a rapist.
Let that sink in.
And your father bred a coward.
He bred a man who cannot own up to the sins of his son. A man who cannot commit to somehow attempting to make reparations on the life your son brutalized. A man who has not attempted to fathom the fact that your son, in what might be called "a moment of weakness" but is nothing short of a moment of pure, unadulterated evil, stole a huge piece of joy from the young life of a woman who was just trying to have a good time with her little sister.
You somehow conjured up the gall to pen a letter that was shared by a Stanford faculty member on Twitter in which you attempted to reduce the evil your son committed to what you called "20 minutes of action."
How dare you.
A lot less has happened in a lot more time that has had a tremendous impact on many more lives.
Remember learning about Hiroshima in school? It took a matter of seconds for a bomb to drop that killed 80,000 people instantly.
Ever seen a car accident happen? Ever been in one? It didn't take 20 minutes of action for that to happen, did it? No, it only takes a fleeting moments' inattention for two cars to collide, and for a body to crash through a windshield and succumb to death. In the U.S., a fatal car accident occurs every 15 minutes.
But one of those was a government-orchestrated act of war, and the others are accidents.
Twenty minutes is a long damn time, Dan. That was 20 minutes that your son spent very purposefully and very intentionally taking advantage of a woman who had no ability whatsoever to defend herself.
You can hire a fancy lawyer. You can take advantage of whatever privilege you may have. You can write letters and read them in open court all day. You can weave whatever narrative you like about how much your precious little boy likes steak and how sad he is now that he has snatched the peace of mind from a young woman who didn't do a thing wrong.
But you will never be in the right, and Brock will have the weight of those 20 minutes on him for the rest of his life, as well as the weight of the lies he told and the narrative he wove to make up the fact that his victim couldn't properly recall the events of the horrible evening in January.
Your son deserves to sit in jail for the rest of his life. 20 years is not enough, six months is an insult to every victim of sexual assault in America, and a probation sentence is a monumental failure of the American justice system.
When you pick up a writing utensil again, or when you open up a Microsoft Word document again, I hope it's to craft an apology to your son's victim and to every man and woman who has had their happiness snatched from them by someone's "20 minutes of action."
Until then, I hope you can somehow find away to live with yourself long enough to look your son in the face and tell him you're sorry, too, for not teaching him that actions have consequences, and that his life isn't the most important one.
Sincerely,
One of thousands of men and women infuriated by your words.
