The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Wounded Antelope of the Herd’

Posted on | June 6, 2016 | 107 Comments

Her blood-alcohol content was three times the legal driving limit, except she wasn’t driving. She had attended a fraternity party:

I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama”, because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.
The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway.

The 22-year-old, a recent graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, had been unconscious when she was sexually assaulted in an alley by a Stanford University freshman named Brock Turner:

The two bikers skidded to a stop on “Scary Path.” True to its nickname among Stanford students, the dirt trail on the edge of campus was home to something sinister in the early hours of Jan. 18, 2015.
The bikers were on their way to a frat party. They halted, however, at the sight of a man lying on top of a half-naked woman.
Normally, the bikers might have been amused to catch sight of fellow students having sex. But this was different.
The man, tall and slim and athletic, was thrusting atop the woman.
The woman wasn’t moving. At all.
“Is everything okay?” Lars Peter Jonsson, a Swedish graduate student, shouted.
When the man turned around, Jonsson could see the woman’s genitals were exposed.
“She didn’t react to my call,” Jonsson testified [March 25] in a Palo Alto, Calif., courtroom, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “I said, ‘What the f— are you doing? She’s unconscious.’”
The man tried to run away, but Jonsson and his friend caught him and pinned him to the ground until police came and made an arrest.

Last week, Brock Turner — a three-time All-American champion swimmer in high school who was once touted as a future Olympian — was sentenced to six months in county jail and three years’ probation:

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky said he weighed Turner’s character, lack of criminal history and remorsefulness in determining to bypass the heavier penalty of six years in state prison requested by prosecutors.
With good behavior, Turner, 20, is expected to serve three months in county jail. He will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and complete a sex offender management program. . . .
After Thursday’s hearing, District Attorney Jeff Rosen said Turner should have been sent to prison for sexual assault. “The punishment does not fit the crime,” he said.
In sentencing memos, prosecutors called Turner a “continued threat to the community” and asked the judge to sentence him to six years in state prison.

The leniency of Turner’s sentence has outraged feminists, and it would be the better part of valor not to further arouse their indignation. However, it is worth pointing out that (a) Turner was an 18-year-old freshman, (b) his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and (c) why does Stanford University allow fraternities to serve alcohol to teenagers?

This is the dirty little secret of so-called “rape culture” on our nation’s college campuses. The legal drinking age is 21, but teenagers want to get drunk, and so university administrations — and police in college towns — simply refuse to enforce the law. Are we supposed to believe that Stanford officials and the police in Palo Alto have no inkling that 18-year-olds are getting drunk at frat parties?

Under California law, “every person who sells, furnishes, gives, or causes to be sold, furnished, or given away any alcoholic beverage to any person under 21 years of age is guilty of a misdemeanor,” and “any person under 21 years of age who purchases any alcoholic beverage, or any person under 21 years of age who consumes any alcoholic beverage in any on-sale premises, is guilty of a misdemeanor.” So the fraternity which served alcohol to Brock Turner was engaged in a criminal enterprise, and furthermore, if furnishing alcohol to someone under 21 “proximately causes great bodily injury” — and, yeah, I think that would include rape — the provider can be sentenced to as much as a year in jail.

If drunk teenagers are committing rape at Stanford, doesn’t the university have an obligation to prevent its teenage students from getting drunk? There are limits to how far the administration can go in supervising its students’ extracurricular activities, but certainly if a fraternity is serving booze to 18-year-old freshmen — who then proceed to rape women who get drunk at these parties — the university is not powerless to act, nor are fraternities exempt from the authority of local law enforcement.

“No More Fun of Any Kind!”

Dean Vernon Wormer would know how to handle this problem, but Stanford University (annual tuition $46,320) spectacularly failed in its duty to protect Brock Turner from the known evils of Demon Rum:

Turner attended a party at the Kappa Alpha fraternity on the southwestern edge of Stanford’s Palo Alto campus . . .
At the party, he met a pair of sisters.
The older one had been reluctant to come out. The 22-year-old had recently graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and moved back in with her parents. She had a serious boyfriend in Philadelphia and planned to stay home.
But she changed her mind when her younger sister and her friends began to drink whiskey and champagne, she told the jury, according to the Mercury News.
After having four whiskey drinks at home, the woman and her sister were driven to Stanford to meet female friends. From there, the young women went to the party. . . .
According to Turner’s testimony, he and the woman danced and kissed at the party. Sometime around midnight, he asked her whether she would like to go back to his dorm and she said yes, Turner testified.
They held hands as they left the party, but then she slipped and they both fell, he said. Once on the ground, they started kissing near a trash bin, and when he asked whether he could touch her genitals, she once again agreed, he testified, according to the Mercury News.
When he asked her whether she liked it, she replied “uh huh” and then they started “dry humping,” he claimed in court.

This is not your typical “he-said/she-said” incident, because the woman has no memory at all of what happened that night. Her friends disputed Turner’s testimony, but evidently all of them were so drunk they didn’t even notice her leaving the party, and what can we conclude?

Here was a teenage boy, with a .16 blood-alcohol level — seriously drunk, but conscious and ambulatory — who sexually assaulted a passed-out woman with a .24 blood-alcohol level who has no memory of meeting Brock Turner, much less leaving the party with him or being sexually assaulted by him. “He may not look like a rapist,” the prosecutor told the jury at Turner’s trial, “but he is the . . . face of campus sexual assault.”

 

OK, if you say so — this is the face of campus sexual assault: Brock Turner, All-American swimmer, a teenage boy who got drunk at a frat party at an elite university where the administration tolerates underage drinking. We have the court statement of Turner’s victim:

My boyfriend did not know what happened, but called that day and said, “I was really worried about you last night, you scared me, did you make it home okay?” I was horrified. That’s when I learned I had called him that night in my blackout, left an incomprehensible voicemail, that we had also spoken on the phone, but I was slurring so heavily he was scared for me, that he repeatedly told me to go find [my sister]. . . .
When the detective asked [Turner] if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn’t know. He admitted to kissing other girls at that party, one of whom was my own sister who pushed him away. He admitted to wanting to hook up with someone. I was the wounded antelope of the herd, completely alone and vulnerable, physically unable to fend for myself, and he chose me. Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue. . . .
Alcohol is not an excuse. Is it a factor? Yes. But alcohol was not the one who stripped me, fingered me, had my head dragging against the ground, with me almost fully naked. Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone close to them who has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much. Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault. We were both drunk, the difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately, and run away. That’s the difference.

Parents must warn their teenage sons about this: Whatever happens in any sexual situation, only he can be held legally responsible.

In the 21st century, no woman is ever responsible for anything.

As for my daughters, I warn them never to get drunk, and certainly to avoid elite universities like Stanford, where all the boys are rapists.





 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

Comments

107 Responses to “‘The Wounded Antelope of the Herd’”

  1. SouthOhioGipper
    June 8th, 2016 @ 5:57 am

    A young, straight white male sentenced to six years of rapes by black men. That is what the feminists would call social justice.

  2. Slidellman4life
    June 8th, 2016 @ 8:06 am

    Parents must warn their teenage sons about this: Whatever happens in any sexual situation, only he can be held legally responsible.

    In the 21st century, no woman is ever responsible for anything.

    As for my daughters, I warn them never to get drunk, and certainly to avoid elite universities like Stanford, where all the boys are rapists.

    Stacy, what the hell are you implying with this?

    I sense you need to back the hell up, dude.

  3. Slidellman4life
    June 8th, 2016 @ 8:18 am

    But it doesn’t matter how drunk he apparently was. It is impossible to get consent from a woman who is inebriated to the point of unconsciousness. And he knew he was doing something wrong, as he got up and ran when the bikers said something. So, no, the light sentence was an outrage. Period.

  4. DeadMessenger
    June 8th, 2016 @ 1:10 pm

    Not such a light sentence. Registering as a sex offender for life means that life, as he knows it, is over for him.

  5. Wombat_socho
    June 8th, 2016 @ 5:12 pm

    No, that would be me. Bye now.

  6. Joe Joe
    June 9th, 2016 @ 1:08 am

    A postscript on this case is the absence of a moral compass in the convicted rapist’s father:

    http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/08/being-a-stanford-athlete-is-no-excuse-for-rape/

  7. La Belle Dame sans Merci : The Other McCain
    June 9th, 2016 @ 9:34 pm

    […] of the commenters on my Monday post about this case pointed out that, perhaps, I was reading this whole story the wrong way. What critics of the […]