Now he faces of lifetime of struggling for decent work
The Guardian publishes samples of the many many letters urging Judge Persky not to sentence Brock Turner to prison.
The father’s letter, however, is just one of dozens of testimonials that Turner’s supporters sent to Persky – letters that the judge said he seriously considered in his decision to allow the former swimmer to avoid the minimum prison time of two years prescribed by law.
The Guardian has obtained copies of all the letters Persky received – statements that defend Turner’s actions, blame the victim for being assaulted, and decry the consequences the swimmer has faced while ignoring the suffering of the 23-year-old woman. The letters, along with Turner’s own statement, provide a window into a culture that critics say devalues victims, minimizes the seriousness of campus sexual assault, and fails to hold perpetrators accountable.
And treats people less white than Turner very differently.
Some examples from some letters:
Carolyn and Richard Bradfield, grandparents
Brock is the only person being held accountable for the actions of other irresponsible adults. He raised a right hand, swore an oath and told the truth.
Brock is a good 20 year old young man who has never been in trouble. Brock has essentially served a 14 month jail sentence while awaiting trial. We beg the court to grant time served and no additional time to our grandson, Brock Turner.
I guess the grandparents think Emily Doe should be held accountable for her own rape? Turner assaulted her, so she should be held accountable just as he is? Or maybe more? The fact that she didn’t assault anyone is beside the point?
Carleen Turner, mother
He will live a lifetime of scrutiny, he lost 2 jobs just because he was accused of this, now he faces of lifetime of struggling for decent work. Can he be on a college campus? I don’t know … I beg of you, please don’t send him to jail/prison. Look at him. He won’t survive it. He will be damaged forever and I fear he would be a major target. Stanford boy, college kid, college athlete – all the publicity. This would be a death sentence for him. Having lost everything he has ever worked for his entire life and knowing the registry is a requirement for the rest of his life certainly is more than harsh. His dreams have been shattered by this.
His dreams. Never mind about her dreams.
Caroline Turner, sister
A series of alcohol-fueled decisions that he made within an hour timespan will define him for the rest of his life. Goodbye to NCAA championships. Goodbye to the Olympics. Goodbye to becoming an orthopedic surgeon. Goodbye to life as he knew it.
It’s almost as if Emily Doe raped him, not the other way around.
Jeff Coudron, family friend
The verdict hurt because we knew he was a great kid that in the matter of a few hours, made a few bad decisions that have changed his life forever. The media never mentioned the girl’s name to protect her, but they plastered Brock’s everywhere, even before he was tried.
There’s a reason for that. It’s because she is the victim and he is the rapist.
Meghan Olson, assistant swim coach for the Dayton Raiders swim club
In spite of one night of alcohol-induced poor decision making, Brock is still the same intelligent young man that enrolled in Stanford University in the fall of 2015 and can unquestionably make a significantly meaningful contribution to society.
It was just bad decision making, that’s all – no, not even bad, just poor. It was poor decision making. Or maybe mediocre? Let’s call it mediocre. It was mediocre decision making. We don’t punish that. End of.
Has she missed the part where only one of them raped the other? No, drinking means bad girl, and bad girl means fair game. Besides, he was going to contribute to society. She was just a woman. Plus, dreams. We can’t spoil those dreams of his, and she almost certainly has none worth mentioning.
This makes me think of that case of the high school athletes who put their video of sexual assault on YouTube and people still came out of the woodwork in their defense. And, it was going to kill their dreams. It was going to destroy their life.
To listen to these sorts of things suggests to me that the only time we should ever indict and convict a rapist is when they are too old to have dreams anymore, they’ve already lived their dreams. No, wait, Bill Cosby. A lot of people are saying there is no point in putting a man his age in jail, and besides, he might not live through it because he is old and not well. So. The real message? Rapists, rape all you like, we’ve got your back.
I’m always fascinated by the terminology used by rape apologists. The victim needs to be “accountable.” Needs to “take responsibility.” For what? What did she do wrong? If it was rape, then by definition she didn’t consent, and this was a bad thing that was done to her, not by her or with her voluntary participation. And if it wasn’t rape, then there was no wrongdoing for her to be “held accountable” for.
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. I know damn well what these people think victims did wrong — she had sex, and sex is bad (at least for women) and so she needs to take her share of the blame for the sex-having.(1) Sure, she might not have chosen to have sex, but then (cue Richard Dawkins) a drunk driver may not have chosen to smash into someone else’s car, but is still responsible for the consequences. Everyone knows that if you’re a woman, and you get drunk, you may end up having sex, consensually or otherwise, and must bear some blame for this illicit sex-having.
(1) Bonus points here for claiming that women “cry rape” because they regret having sex. Yep, I know that when I’ve done something I regret, my preferred course of action is to tell a whole bunch of doctors and nurses and police officers and prosecutors all about it.
And none of them can see that the more accurate analogy here is that she is the car that is smashed into, not the driver doing the smashing. It would be more accurate if they say that a car sitting still by the side of the road (unconscious, as an analogy only) didn’t choose to be smashed into, but that the owner of the car that is legally parked in his driveway or on the street must bear some of the responsibility. But who says that? No one. He has a right to park his car where it is, and expect not to find it smashed up in the morning.
The drunk driver is the rapist, not the rapee. If people like Dawkins can’t understand that, they need to go back to remedial analogy class.
Isn’t that the problem in a nutshell? Rape apologists see the victim as the real perpetrator. “They made me do it”, “They/we/I were/was drunk and besides it takes two”, “They are a promiscuous slut”, “I didn’t mean to, but she dressed in a way that made me horny”, “She didn’t say no, so she must have enjoyed lying in filth while I shoved pine needles up her vagina”. We all get the picture I’m sure.
The thing is, these are not evil people (generally, I guess). They are ordinary people who just cannot comprehend that ‘normal’ behaviour is actually wrong and that their empathy is directed at the wrong party.
I find humanity so deeply disappointing sometimes. Actually, frequently.
Ordinary people can be evil, though, just by not bothering or not being able to take other people’s rights seriously enough.
He’d probably face less of a lifetime struggling for decent work if the judge had handed over a proper sentence. Shit going viral is not doing that kid any favors, but ultimately it’s something he did to himself. Maybe if he’d done the slightest bit of manning up he’d be in a better position.
“People… are… terrible.”
Hmmm…he “manned up” all too well.
It isn’t necessarily rape apology per se. It may just be the horror of affluent, non-minority people–who don’t usually have contact with the criminal justice system–seeing one of their own being sent to prison.
There was a similar output pouring of support for Scooter Libby when he was being sentenced: many, many letters to the judge from family and friends, politicians and celebrities, all extolling Libby and pleading for lenience. The judge in that case was somewhat taken aback by this. I seem to recall him saying something to the effect of, you know, this is a federal court; this is what we do here: we sentence people to prison.
Reading the references to Turner “struggling for decent work” and saying “Goodbye to becoming an orthopedic surgeon” reminds me of something else that really irks me: the sense of entitlement to a “good job,” i.e. well-paying, white-collar, high-status.
If I may quote a different judge, Caddyshack’s Judge Smails, “the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” Smails, of course, was being an asshole snob to the working-class caddie Danny Noonan, in response to Danny’s concern about not being able to afford college without the caddie scholarship that Smails controlled.
But the world does need “ditchdiggers” — well, maybe not literally ditchdiggers, but people who do similar unglamorous, not-terribly-well-paid, work. And it has them. Millions of Americans do those kinds of jobs every day. And most of us more privileged folk — and I’m including myself — maybe talk once in a while about getting them a higher wage, or better health care, or something, but for the most part we just shrug. They make a living; they get by; they’re part of the background of America. Maybe they made some bad life choices, or didn’t work hard enough in school, or maybe just had bad luck, but what can we do about it?
But when one of the privileged is faced with the possibility of losing that privilege, and the prospect of having to *gasp* struggle for “decent” work…. suddenly the life that is good enough for millions of fellow citizens is just a Fate Too Dire To Face. What if poor Brock Turner has to live a life as an ordinary working person? Oh, the humanity!
I had the same reaction to the attempted rehabilitations of Stephen Glass and Jonah Lehrer. Both committed pretty much the worst professional sin a journalist can: intentional fabrication. And they covered it up and lied about it and lashed out at their accusers and denied it until finally they couldn’t deny it any longer. Then Stephen Glass shows up a couple of years later applying to become a member of the California Bar. Gee, wonder if there’s a problem with his “moral character”? And the letters in support of Glass’s application were full of bemoaning about how gosh, we’ve got to let the man earn a living. Ditto for Lehrer, who barely was out of the limelight for a couple of months before he was being offered five-figure speaking fees. But gosh, we were told, what do you expect? The man’s gotta live!
The unspoken implication always being that people like Glass and Lehrer, and Brock Turner, can’t possibly be expected to live the life of a janitor or sales clerk or whatever. People who violate the ethics of their profession, or even violate another human being, are still entitled to a “good” job. People who live those lives already, because they couldn’t afford college, or maybe they screwed up in high school and didn’t work enough, or made some bad decisions that didn’t hurt anyone other than themselves — well, we don’t shed any tears for them. Somebody’s gotta dig them ditches. Just not one of us.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on Now he faces of lifetime of struggling for decent […]
Ophelia @ 5 – well that was my point exactly. He wasn’t being evil, just ordinarily terrible.
and @ 6 – Quite. Perfect display of acceptable ‘manly’ behaviour as exhibited by so many MRA’s, PUA’s, Jocks, assholes and their unthinking and/or uncaring or oblivious supporters. They make up a pretty big chunk of society…
He may have to say goodbye to the Olympics, but it is unlikely that he will have to say goodbye to becoming an orthopedic surgeon. If you are near the top of the pile you always get a second choice, and a third and a fourth… If you are near the bottom you only ever get one chance while if you are right at the bottom you get no chance at all.
No one deliberately pours alcohol into people about to attempt driving. And bars and restaurants have been penalized for recklessly serving people who were about to drive.
Alcohol is regularly used to incapacitate women for rape. It is no less a guilty act that administering Rohypnol.
The closest parallel I can come up with is the tradition of waterfront bars to assist sailors drinking themselves into unconsciousness (with or without additional chemical aides) so that those men could be ‘trafficked’ into unpaid slavery on long voyages. Hence the name ‘Shanghai-ing.’ I don’t think that pointing out this hazard, or warning potential victims was ‘shaming’ or ‘victim blaming.’
Only where sex, or some warped derangement thereof, is involved does the spectre of victim blaming arise. And for some reason, Alcohol is consistently minimized as a hazard. In this instance only, we seem to revert to the ‘good old days’ when drunk driving was a joke. Or for that matter, when the tobacco industry flooded the public with ‘doubt’ messages about health risks.
It’s things like this that made me put away words like “monster” when describing people like Brock. Because when you use language like that, it’s easy to look around yourself and say, “Rape is something that monsters do. Well, I’m not a monster, and none of my friends or families are monsters, and so none of us could ever be guilty of something like ~rape~.”
It takes an act of will to recognize that no, HUMANS rape, and almost to a statistical absolute, male humans rape. But it’s necessary, because recognizing that you’ll never know if someone is a rapist unless they opt to rape you is essential for getting out of this ’20 minutes’ bullshit.
Brock’s own letter is a piece of work, too. It actually starts off ok, saying he takes sole responsibility and apologizing for the pain he caused the victim. But then he gets right on with blaming that Ol’ Demon Rum:
and bemoaning the fact that the media took an interest in his case because he was cursed, cursed! with athletic ability:
and vowing to become a spokesman against the evil of promiscuity:
Because if we increase our shaming of people who have sex, that will make rape go away. Somehow.