As the week comes and goes, everyone looks forward to Friday. It’s the day you won’t have any more classes until Monday. You can go out that night and not worry about being a completely functional human the next morning. A day when you celebrate a little harder because you worked hard and you deserve it.
But this Friday won’t be that Friday. Not for me, not for some of you and not for an anonymous woman who lost her sense of self and safety months ago.
Because on Friday, September 2, Brock Turner is going to be released from incarceration.
Three. Months. Early.
Before we get deeper into this I would like to take the time to remind you of how Brock Turner the Stanford Rapist became Brock Turner the Stanford Rapist.
In 2014, Brock Turner was arrested after two students who were biking spotted him behind a dumpster, sexually assaulting an unconscious woman at Stanford University. He was originally charged with FIVE felony counts: rape of an unconscious person, rape of an intoxicated person, sexual penetration by a foreign object of an unconscious woman, sexual penetration by foreign object of an intoxicated woman, and assault with the intent to commit rape.
From there a trial began, which you knew would happen based on the fact that beforehand he was released on $150,000 bail.
He was found guilty by the jury of three of the five felonies: assault with the intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an unconscious person, and penetration of an intoxicated person. From there one would assume he would spend AT LEAST 15 to 20 years in prison, correct? (Unless you’re like me and you wanted him to rot in a cell forever.)
He should have been sentenced to 14 years maximum, but Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky only sentenced him to six months. (Side note: Aaron Persky has announced that he will no longer be overseeing criminal trials, but it’s a little too late for that isn’t it?)
You may be wondering at this point, why is this piece titled the way it is? What kind of person would consider Stanford rapist Brock Turner to be a true American boy?
I can answer this in the best way possible: the kind of person who has seen this happen again and again.
Who listened to her friend cry on the phone to her three days into her Sophomore year because she woke up next to a man she had no recollection of. Someone who watched her friends drop classes or change schools because they couldn’t escape the people who did things to them that should never be done to another person. Someone who realized too little, too late, that someone they cared for didn’t believe in changing your mind or the word no.
I watched this event unfold before my eyes, read every detail of the case and the letter of the anonymous woman who lost so much that night, the letter of the father who said a lifetime in jail isn’t worth “20 minutes of action,” and the mother who claimed that even though her son did this, he never would. I sat in the background and waited to hear how he would rot away for destroying someone’s sense of self like he did, and yet he got nothing.
He is an example of privilege. He is an example of misogyny. He is an example of America’s judicial system and all that is wrong within our country.
Stanford Rapist Brock Turner, is the all-American boy.
