‘The Wounded Antelope of the Herd’

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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.





 

107 comments

  1. Staying away from so called “elite” universities is a good idea anyway. The high tuition doesn’t give anything in return that a good state university won’t give you. If you absoposilutely must have Stanford or Princeton on your diploma, I suppose you must go, but it won’t matter in the end and you’ll be out about 5 times the money you would be if you went to Cow State Tech instead.

  2. These youth are decadent and depraved.

    Institutions like Stanford do not encourage this. It’s just that institutions and parents generally do nothing to discourage it. Ditto the law and the mental health trade. I’d say ditto the churches, but hardly anyone pays clergymen any mind anymore and most of them have earned being ignored.

    When institutions do discourage it, they do so by denying the agency of women and visiting often nonsensical punishments on the male, so can never be legitimate.

    Neither of these young people make a sympathetic character.

  3. What you have here is two people who set out, as Art Deco above notes, to be as decadent and depraved as possible. This leads to the question, why? What is it about their respective backgrounds and upbringing which led to that moment? I’m not a pollyanna and I certainly remember my days in college, wherein I consumed by share of intoxicants and held forth at off-campus digs which were somewhat renowned for their hospitality on weekends. Nonetheless, I was never tempted to bang a passed out chick behind a dumpster. Frankly, the whole thing was facilitated not by the easy, permissive college culture, but by the fact that neither of these young people possessed a moral compass of any kind.

  4. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I note that the elite universities exist not because they provide a superior undergraduate education necessarily, but because they serve a class of people who use the credential as evidence of membership in the class. While it’s possible for lower-level class to obtain entry to the institution itself, it is very difficult to obtain entry into the class the university symbolizes.

    And I note, the opposite is true, as well. The elite class can send its children to “lesser” institutions without adverse effects to their status.

    But you’re absolutely correct in that it’s quite possible to obtain the same or even better education at the right state school for substantially less money than if one attended one of the prestige universities. STEM is a case in point. The university with the highest starting salaries and best return on investment for the last several years is South Dakota School of Mines. Within the top 20 or so, you also have schools like Missouri S & T and other STEM dedicated institutions which charge minimal amounts of tuition (comparatively) and have stratospheric placement rates for graduates.

  5. Yes, they were both drunk, and yes, they both bear some responsibility, but sorry, drunk or otherwise, any male who doesn’t understand, even when drunk, that you don’t assault an unconscious woman, is not a man, and deserves neither respect nor mercy. He should have gotten the six years for which the prosecutor asked.

    It is a man’s duty to protect a helpless woman from harm by others,

  7. maybe it’s kind of like drugs or porn. the more you do it (indulge yourself) the more extreme the indulgence has to be to get the same “high”. eventually you get to the point where your inner voice says “go ahead…you’re entitled to violate this woman. she didn’t say no”

  8. if that was my daughter he’d be glad to do 6 years. i’m old enough and close enough to retirement that i could do 25 to life with no problem

  10. Certainly I don’t endorse or defend his behavior. The kind of drinking it takes to get to .16 BAC is bad behavior in its own right. One can have a splendid time without reaching a BAC past .08. To deliberately drink yourself into beast mode — which is what a .16 BAC is about — is wrong, and the consequences are bad. If Brock Turner had put that woman in his car and driven head-on into a bridge abutment at 90 mph, the mourners at his funeral would have described his death as a “tragedy.” As it is, his life is utterly ruined — being a registered sex offender is the modern equivalent of the mark of Cain — and I suppose he wishes he had driven into a bridge abutment instead. Just incidentally, I don’t know what kind of plea bargain the prosecutors offered Turner, but he was a fool not to take it.

  11. “Nonetheless, I was never tempted to bang a passed out chick behind a dumpster.”

    Of course, there weren’t a lot of chicks passed out behind dumpsters back then, but at Stanford University, I suppose this is common nowadays.

  12. I don’t have time for an extended comment right now, but we’re going to have some problems with this. You see fake charges everywhere and can’t tell a legitimate case when you see it.

    1. The DA actually had EVIDENCE enough to bring to court and get a Grand Jury to send it through. (This rarely happens.)

    2. There were witnesses to the young woman’s unconscious state and to the young man running away.

    I think you need to get away from this topic for awhile.

  14. See, this is where my legal training kicks in. I have a few stories, which I could share because, you know, it’s just us friends here on the internet. Suffice it to say, I’m living proof of Proverbs 22:6.

  16. Actually, it’s not a smoking gun. This was one single case and it was properly prosecuted. The judge’s sentence was light, but there was a sentence.

    What we have to keep hammering away at is that UNIVERSITY cases are NOT properly prosecuted or even fairly adjudicated in any way. Most of the university cases we’ve heard about were utterly BOGUS and would never have made it past a police investigation.

  17. Stacy,

    This was a real court case with real evidence that made it through the DA’s office, a grand jury, and an actual trial. (And that’s saying a lot in a rape case.)

    The prosecutor was not Mike Nifong and the case didn’t fall apart before it began. This was not Mattress Girl, or UVA, or Joshua Strange, or any number of university kangaroo courts.

    This is the criminal justice system properly at work.

  18. The guy is a serious creep — what he did is not just a sexual assault her being unconscious makes it pretty much like necrophilia and also shows a lack of regard for her as a sentient being. Would you let him near your daughter or hire him for a job?

  19. This is an important point. While I consider Brock Turner a fool for not having taken whatever plea bargain the prosecutors offered, by forcing the case to trial, at least, we had a full airing of the facts, and verdict of a jury to decided the case.

    The Star Chamber tribunals of Title IX proceedings are a different matter. Rape is a felony, not a school discipline issue, and should be investigated and prosecuted according to law.

  22. Sorry, I’ve been that drunk or drunker and never considered assaulting another living thing let alone getting as close to necrophilia as possible without visiting a funeral home. The idea that being drunk excuses anything doesn’t work for me. When people are drunk, they do things they may not have done sober because their inhibitions are down, but they don’t do things out of character. What is that saying about there being truth in wine?

  23. What’s scary about that is at many colleges that’s Thursday through Saturday or Sunday night for the kids.

  24. My son did both under and grad work at Missouri S&T. I did mine at Tennessee Tech. Both schools are comparable, although Tech isn’t the STEM university it used to be. Over two thirds of the student body used to be in Science and Engineering, like MO S&T (S&T is smaller, about half the size of Tech). In ’92, when I granulated (there was a bad recession on), the placement rate wasn’t good at Tech, or anywhere else, for that matter, but it is normally in the stratosphere. Neither my son or I had any trouble finding work, but both of us were experienced in the field we were entering.

    MO S&T changed their name while my son was there. The name change didn’t go over well at all. A friend of my son refused to give saying “I graduated from UMR not S&T.” I understand a lot of the local alumni were unamused.

  25. For the most part, I agree. There are however certain fields where the job will almost always go to the graduates of elite schools over graduates of even highly ranked state schools. I’m not saying you can’t get the job, but it is significantly easier if you have the right name on the resume, belong to the “right” alumni group in your city, or can find a mutual school connection.

  27. The wealthy use money to make money, so their “work” involves deal-making, for which they need connections, such as can be had by joining the right fraternity at the right school. Then the kid can make his own money working for another deal-maker, until he builds up enough of a stake (and additional connections) to work for himself.

    They really only need good enough grades to stay in the college, and by extension the fraternity. They aren’t actually going to work like a peasant if they can possibly help it.

  28. My dad graduated when it was Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. My son just finished his second year and has a fabulous summer job and will graduate with no student loans.

    My daughter went to Truman State and got a journalism job in Europe with three B.A.s in the liberal arts, also with no loans.

    Bottom line: Parents need to do research into their kids’ college choices and not be seduced by the cachet of sending your kid to an “elite” institution.

  29. Just cause she wasn’t moving doesn’t mean anything. She could’ve just been meditating while waiting for him to finish. I’ve heard women talk about doing this when their husbands just won’t leave them alone so they just lie there like a dead animal hoping they’ll get done and go away.

    Maybe she said okay and then passed out.

    We need some sensible rules here and the women aren’t helping any. To them you need a signed and witness affidavit that you have permission to have sex with them. Guys don’t work on those time scales.

    This has long been a problem between the sexes. The women want less or no sex and the men want more or unlimited sex.

    And all that the sexual revolution did was remove the legal parameters that spelled out who was responsible for what so that now we don’t have any.

    Me I gave up on the whole deal years ago. Too much trouble, too expensive (in so many ways) and too fraught with future problems.

    Glad I did cause things only got worse afterwards. (this was about when AIDS was discovered and things haven’t gotten better since).

  30. You’re living in a make believe world. It is not a man’s “duty” unless he makes it so. Women keep telling us how responsible and smart they are and to let them live their lives the way they want.

    What’s a woman’s duty to a man?

  31. A drunken guy taking advantage of a passed out co-ed? Not the first time something like that has happened, but he wasn’t so drunk so as to miss the opportunity to have sex with her in public. I do consider it criminal.

    I could see the light sentence given his mental state and intoxication. It could have been a bit harsher. But he got charged criminally and convicted. That is a pretty harsh outcome.

  35. Oh come on, you at least have to be .20 to be a playah. I knew a guy who survived .48, but he was sort of messed up after that. Hard to tell, though, he was a bit messed up before (you have to seriously train to get that sort of tolerance).

  36. “When people are drunk, they do things they may not have done sober because their inhibitions are down, but they don’t do things out of character. What is that saying about there being truth in wine?”

    Maybe that’s your experience, but I’ve seen people who were entirely civilized when sober become belligerent brawlers when drunk.

    It is certainly true that alcohol lowers inhibitions and at .16 BAC — staggering drunk — inhibitions are nearly non-existent:

    0.13-0.15 BAC: Gross motor impairment and lack of physical control. Blurred vision and major loss of balance. Euphoria is reduced and dysphoria (anxiety, restlessness) is beginning to appear. Judgment and perception are severely impaired.
    0.16-0.19 BAC: Dysphoria predominates, nausea may appear. The drinker has the appearance of a “sloppy drunk.”

    These effects — particularly the severe impairment of judgment and perception — are why smart people keep an eye out for signs of trouble when they’re at a bar or a party late in the evening. The guy who was smiling and friendly at 9 p.m. may cuss you out and try to pick a fight at midnight, and I have more than once seen police haul drunks out of bars in situations where the drunk was just thrashing around violently in mindless animal rage.

    If Brock Turner had stabbed someone to death while at a .16 BAC, that would be murder, and rape is rape, even at .16 BAC. “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” but the fact that Brock Turner was so extremely intoxicated as a result of underage drinking at a fraternity is highly relevant to the discussion of his crime in the context of so-called “rape culture” discourse. Over and over, we see the role that alcohol plays in this problem, and I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that university officials and police in college towns are not enforcing the alcohol laws. At the very least, someone at Kappa Alpha should have been responsible for ensuring the safety of their guests. When you have an 18-year-old boy with a .16 BAC, and a female who arrives at the party already drunk (four drinks before she left home) and staggers outside at midnight with .24 BAC and passes out in an alley, clearly the fraternity ought to be subject to sanctions. And it seems to me that if Stanford officials are unwilling to do anything about the alcohol problem on campus, the local police need to crack down.

  37. I’ll just say this: the age 21 for drinking has been very bad for America. No way to properly teach drinking habits and behavior, and there’s a rash of these messy drunken idiots.

    What drives me nuts is a man can be trusted to save a ship at age 20, but can’t legally buy a beer.

  38. Well, i was an experienced drinker before I got to college at age 17, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t also recklessly foolish. One night I passed out on the front porch of the ATO house (50-cent draft beers and $1 tequila shots were the party fare that night) and woke up the next morning with a sign taped to my chest that said, “WASTED.”

    Because I graduated years before the MADD-inspired nationwide 21 drinking age, I can’t imagine the scene on campus nowadays. When I was in high school in Georgia, drinking age was 18 and enforcement was not rigorous, and there were plenty of kids who were drinking on fake IDs in Atlanta nightclubs at 16.

  41. Yes, setting a legal drinking age floor has certainly created more problems than it has solved (one must wonder sometimes if that’s the desired goal). On the other hand, given America’s 400-year-old schizophrenic complex about alcohol (the ultra-religious and ultra-conservative Puritans were expert brewers and beer was a staple of the American diet for all ages for the first 200-plus years of the country’s history), it was an inevitability. Prohibition, the attitudes in the two decades imnediately preceding it, and the sea change in attitude following it, the result of nearly 15 years of civic brainwashing during the dry years, altered America’s relationship with alcohol forever.

    While it is at least theoretically possible that America could return to a sane view of alcohol consumption and readjust its laws to once again resemble those of a civilized nation, 45-plus years of drug warring make that kind of rational action unlikely.

  42. From what I can gather, the woman’s younger sister had left the party to take a drunk partygoer home, then returned after the woman had left. If she left with him voluntarily but later passed out, then some leniency is justifiable IMO. In any case his having to register as a sex offender is hardly inconsequential.

  43. Thay theory has been thoroughly debunked. Countries that are lenient towards underage drinking have worse outcomes for alcoholism and drinking to intoxication. There is absolutely zero benefit to exposing adolescent brains to alcohol or drugs.

    However, I think the legal drinking age has extremely little to do with the prevalence of binge drinking.

    The fact is alcohol will continue to wreak havoc on humanity as long as people exist. The Grant Study out of Harvard concluded that the number one factor associated with negative life outcomes was heavy alcohol consumption.

    Every weekend thousands of people say and do things they are horrified by when sober. They wake up in handcuffs and jail cells and in strange beds. They beat people up and steal stuff and destroy property.

    As long as the drinking age is 21 then universities and fraternities have a duty to protect and and educate students. If they had zero tolerance for underage drinking with concomitant heavy fines they could prevent a lot of ruined lives. If they had an objective measure for intoxication that would be a good delineation for punishment. Caught having a beer has consequences. Caught drunk and you face severe consequences. I don’t know if that’s possible though.

  44. I wonder how many drinks you have to consume to get there. I just count drinks when I’m drinking (1oz hard liquor = 1, etc) and use the rule of thumb that it takes 1 hour to burn off one of them. If you’re intoxicated enough to lose count, you’ve had enough and should stop.

  46. Hm, I’ve had times when I’ve consumed a great deal of alcohol (like, 4 Long Islands at a bar) and never really ever got the symptoms of 0.13-0.15. Well, except for the one time where after the fourth glass I flopped onto my friend’s waterbed and noticed the ceiling was rotating. Even then I was still able to walk, just at a seriously diminished speed. I just tend to get to the point where my stomach starts to tell me “you really shouldn’t send any more alcohol my way or you’re going to regret it later” and I cut back or stop entirely.

    Oh, and after those 4 Long Islands? I walked to a nearby 24h laundromat, put a high score on one of the pinball machines (Earthshaker, if you must know, 20M or so) and walked home from there. Then again, I’ve had other times when my stomach told me I should stop after 1 Long Island.

  47. I’ve never understood that. Why get stoned before going to work? Wait until you’re home after work where you can relax and enjoy it properly.

  48. Now you’re reminding me of my ex-wife’s story about her friends getting drunk on the kiddish wine at her bat mitzvah and setting the tablecloth on fire.

  49. Heh. I remember the story of a guy I know, a big guy, probably 6’4″ 250lb or so, he had just been dumped by his girlfriend at the time, so he calls up a friend who tells him he’ll come over and they can go out drinking. Twenty minutes later the friend shows up and the guy has already consumed an entire 1.75l of vodka. The friend wisely sits down and says “We’re not going anywhere.”

    That was the last he remembered of that evening.

    At the other extreme end of the scale is Andre the Giant, who when it came time to calibrate how much anesthesia to give him for his back surgery, told the doctors that it took two quarts of vodka for him to get a buzz.

  50. Absolutely agree. Police stations and the courts are the places where rape cases need to be–for everyone’s justice.

    You already know my opinion on university administrations: I don’t trust them to order lunch. Having them adjudicating rape cases is like asking your 3-year-old to drive a city bus.

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