By now, you’ve all seen the maudlin and tone-deaf letter written by Brock Turner’s father urging that his son get a lenient sentence for his brutal rape of an unconscious woman at Stanford. But believe it or not, that wasn’t the most outrageous letter written in this case. Not by a longshot.
I was in the process of writing about Dan Turner’s breathtakingly stupid letter at Liberal America when I discovered that one of Turner’s childhood friends in Oakwood, Ohio—a suburb of Dayton—had also chimed in. Namely, Leslie Rasmussen. Stanford law professor Michele Dauber tweeted an excerpt.
Dauber was being WAY too kind here. Rasmussen wrings her hands that Turner was convicted on the word of a woman who couldn’t remember how much she drank—but then says that “I am not blaming her directly for this.” She then harrumphs that Turner is only being tarred as a rapist because he was ensnared by the party atmosphere at Stanford—and we’re too politically correct to see it.
If you think this was bad, check out the whole thing at New York magazine. Rasmussen thinks that Turner didn’t commit a crime because he “was not completely in control of his emotions,” and the whole thing was “a huge misunderstanding.” So the fact he was caught thrusting his hips on top of an unconscious woman was just “a huge misunderstanding? I can’t even.
Let’s remember who the real victim is here. In case you missed it, Ashleigh Banfield read the victim’s impact statement on yesterday’s edition of “Legal View.” Watch it here.