Former Stanford University student Brock Turner was just sentenced to six months in county jail for
sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, an unconscionably lenient sentence that the judge, Aaron Persky, delivered in fear that a prison sentence would have a "
severe impact" on 20-year-old Turner. The 23-year-old woman whom Turner assaulted submitted a powerful statement to Judge Persky describing the impact of the attack on
her life, which you can (and should) read in full
over at BuzzFeed. Now, public fury over the young woman's victimization — first by Turner and then by the justice system — has been amplified by the release of a court statement that Turner's father, Dan Turner, penned in defense of his sex-offender son.
It's a breathtakingly repulsive request that Brock Turner receive probation rather than jail time, in which his father argues that his son's life "will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve," which is, he says, "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life." Instead of acknowledging that his son has digitally penetrated a woman without her consent and forever damaged her ability to live a happy, healthy life, Dan Turner expounds on his son's subdued demeanor and changed eating habits. The internet has reacted, rightly, with outrage: