‘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

  2. That’s just it: a man does make it so. That the victim was stupid and irresponsible does not make it any less the man’s duty to protect her.

  3. Let’s suppose, just for the moment, that Mr Turner had gotten away with it, that the two witnesses had never shown up, stopped him, chased him down and apprehended him. What would have been the result?

    Well, he might have continued on, and actually copulated with the victim — this was a ‘digital rape,’ — but then he would, most probably, have just left her there, half-naked, passed out behind a dumpster, to suffer who knows whatever other fate would have been in store for her.

  4. “No way to properly teach drinking habits?” You’ve got to be kidding me! Do you honestly think that lowering the legal drinking age to 18 would improve that?

    The proper legal drinking age ought to be 85.

  7. I don’t agree that it’s my job to protect every drunken idiot out there just because she sits down to pee. There are often terrible consequences for stupid behavior. If you want to go it alone, you accept the consequences for your action.

  9. Back in the stone age (50s-70s) in Tennessee, if you wanted to major in Engineering, there were two schools that were acceptable, Vanderbilt and Tennessee Tech. If you had the money, you went to Vandy (and 3 of my uncles did), if you didn’t you went to Tech (me). If you wanted a well connected alumni association, UT Knoxville was THE place.
    UTK is OK for grad work. By state law it’s a research school. But if you were serious about being an Engineer, Tech and Vandy were the places you went for your undergrad work.
    Vandy is a much different place these days. It’s become a place to avoid. It’s pricey and has become an SJW seminary.

  10. There are some things in life that I cannot understand or even come close to getting a grasp on. This case is one of them. I cannot imagine for any reason (and I will not accept the drunk excuse) that a rational, human male would make a decision to sexually assault a passed out female.

  12. Our esteemed host wrote:

    I don’t know what kind of plea bargain the prosecutors offered Turner, but he was a fool not to take it.

    Dude, Mr Turner is appealing his conviction! That, right there, could set himself up for a much longer sentence. The appeals court could simply order a new trial. The evidence, being the same, should result in a conviction again, and, if so, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’d get several years behind bars.

  13. Like I said, a man takes it upon himself, because that is what a man does. You may read that statement any way you wish.

  14. Oh, really burned me there. I don’t see you driving your noble steed down to the ghettos to protect all those women through the night. What kind of man are you? It’s a nice idea, this so called chivalry, but when you give people a protective little blanket to continue their stupidity, they will continue their stupidity. As long as you’re willing to pretend like there’s some honor in defending drunken harlots, they can both continue being drunken harlots and blame you when things don’t go right. No incentive to change. My protective circle is around those that are willing to follow my rules. If they stray from those rules, there are likely going to be natural consequences. That’s a man.

  15. So, you’d just leave her laying there?

    Just how much effort, on your part, would it actually require? You get out your cell phone, dial 911, and wait for the cops to arrive. That’ll take you what, ten minutes, and you’ve protected someone helpless from further harm.

    Heck, the passed out person doesn’t even have to be a woman; I’d still call 911 to get him some assistance.

  17. The possibility exists that she hadn’t passed out when he started, which I believe that he claimed was the case. And I suppose that it’s possible that he was so drunk that he didn’t realize that she had passed out after he started.

    But that still doesn’t matter.

    I’m guessing that Mr Turner is actually somewhat bright: you don’t get into Stanford, even on a swimming scholarship, if you’re a dunce. But alcohol turns smart people into stupid ones, in this case a very stupid one.

  18. This is one of the areas in which the libertarian in me is in conflict with the man married to a pediatric nurse, the wife who has told me that she has never, ever seen a child abuse case in which drugs and/or — usually and, not or — were not involved. And the vast majority of adults wind up being responsible for caring for children at some point in their lives.

    The libertarian in me says that, if people want to f(ornicate) themselves up on drugs or alcohol, that’s their business, and I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to pay for their stupidity. The husband in me says, Hell no, that’s the wrong way to look at it, because one person’s stupidity almost always hurts other people.

    If God were to visit me at the concrete plant, and tell me that He was giving me His power to do just one thing, it would be to eliminate the human susceptibility to intoxicants.

  19. If I recall correctly, a 12-ounce beer will get you to .02 BAC. The amount of alcohol in a 6-ounce wine glass and a standard shot of whiskey is equivalent to a 12-ounce beer.

    The rate at which the body metabolizes alcohol varies, but is usually about one drink per hour. So if you stay at the party for three hours and drink six beers during that time, you’re likely to be in the range of .06-.08 BAC, although this will vary, as I say. A tall muscular male like Brock Turner would have a lower BAC than a petite female who drank a similar amount of alcohol.

    What usually happens in cases of extreme intoxication — and I have repeatedly warned young people about this — is that kids start “doing shots.” They’re dancing, it’s late at night, and they’re already near the end of a normal 16-hour day, so there is an exhaustion factor involved that they fail to calculate. Dancing gets them thirsty, so they’re going pretty hard at their regular drinks, but then somebody orders a round of shots (e.g., Jagermeister) and they don’t keep count very well.

    OK, you drink four beers in two hours and then add three or four shots of liquor and BOOM!

    You’re easily at .12 BAC at that point, and it’s not going to take too many more shots to put you into the Danger Zone.

    One of the common themes in campus sexual assault cases is that the victim believes someone must have slipped her a date-rape drug, when in most such cases it’s simply a matter of a 120-pound teenage girl who starts doing shots and doesn’t realize how quickly that can put somebody into stumbling, deranged drunkenness. If you have ever seen somebody in such a condition — male or female — you know how difficult it can be to get them to do the only responsible thing: Go home, and sleep it off.

  20. Bad things happen. The frequency of this phenomenon increases with the rate of consumption of mind altering substances. Always has it been so. Teach your children well.

  22. She went to a party with her sister. Many, many young people go to frat parties and many of them don’t get hurt.

    College students build a high tolerance for alcohol. (Some 40% of them binge drink and could be diagnosed as alocholics, at least in college: http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/14/dsm-5-could-mean-40-of-college-students-are-alcoholics/ ) However, once leaving college, most students stop the binge drinking and their tolerance goes down. That seems to be what happened to the victim in this case. Once at a college party, she went back to old habits, but found her body no longer had the tolerance for alcohol that it did. (We used to call it “out of practice.”) That left her unconscious eventually.

    I understand that we are all responsible for our own actions, but having an unexpected reaction to alcohol (or something put in the alcohol) can leave someone vulnerable.

    Look at the case where a young man was sexually assaulted by a young woman after he drank a 5th of Fireball: (For old timers like me, Fireball is the new Thunderbird wine or Mad Dog.)

    Student Conduct File
    https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2841819-Rose-Student-Conduct-File.html

    The behavior described in the report at the link above could be characterized as binge drinking, and the young man had imbibed enough that he was having problems knowing where he was or what he was doing–not quite unconscious but definitely experiencing deficits in memory and cognition.

    It was under these circumstances that a young woman, less inebriated than he was, brought him to her room specifically to have sex with him. The young man did not like her, and under normal circumstances would never have been caught dead in a room with her, but he had very little control over his actions at that point.

    It was only because the young man’s friends were trying to protect him that we know about the sexual activity and the young man’s state. When the young man escaped his rapist, he hid in his female friend’s room. That friend and two others eventually backed the student in a grievance against the young woman, who was expelled.

    So, yes, college students should not be drinking to the point of not being able to control their actions or of being unconscious. However, they do not deserve to be raped as a result.

  23. It does not seem to me that the victim in this case was setting out to be as decadent as possible. Some do; this one appears to simply to have lost her tolerance for alcohol after graduation and found that out too late, after having too much to drink at the frat party. Before graduation, that same amount might not have had nearly the same effect. I don’t think any of us currently drink as much as we drank in college, if we’re honest–unless we have become full-blown alcoholics.

  24. There is no school, outside of the truly Christian ones, that actually enforce drinking laws. Why the universities leave themselves open to so much liability is astounding to me. It can only be because college drinking is overwhelmingly accepted–expected–by the culture.

  27. There were witnesses to her unconscious state. That was one of the reasons there was a conviction. Three people–all males, by the way–witnessed the young woman passed out and the young man running away.

  28. In an ideal world, you are correct. However, we live in a world where there are rapists out there. And doing stupid things results in terrible consequences. Am I defending the young man? Absolutely not. But pretending like there’s no responsibility on her part is nuts. A young lady going to the store and getting dragged into a car and raped deserves more sympathy than a young lady going to a party with a bunch of frat guys, getting completely wasted, and then being surprised when she turns out raped. If I ran around a ghetto in the middle of the night with hundred dollar bills sticking out of my pockets, no one would be surprised or sympathetic that I got mugged. Young women do not belong at drunken orgies. Young men do not belong at drunken orgies. When you show up there, bad things happen are likely to happen to someone and if you’re there, that someone may be you.

    This running around with your head up your butt pretending like everything is inevitable and that actions don’t directly correlate to consequences is dishonest and stupid. If you want to protect young women from rape, you can start by teaching them not to frequent venues where creeps and perverts hang out looking for sex.

  31. Clearly you didn’t get it: she didn’t deliberately set out to get wasted. She underestimated the effect that alcohol would have on her due to past experience.

    Maybe you never drank in college like the rest of us, but I vividly remember the amount I could put away back then. Two years out of college, and I could never drink that amount again. These days, a couple of craft beers can have an effect.

    I understand how this young woman could overestimate her ability to handle alcohol after graduation.

  32. The question was, what was she doing at a drunken frat party with her sister. My question to her sister would be, “What are you doing at a drunken frat party with your sister.”

    If you’re pretending that she was there to protect the younger sister, the BAC would give lie to that.

  34. It’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.

    And yes, you can overestimate your ability with alcohol. Maybe you are perfect and never did that. But trust me, in our 20s a lot of us thought we could handle more than we really could.

  35. The answer was that she went because her sister wanted to go and she wanted to hang out with her sister. You never went to a party with a sibling or friends?

    I am a religious guy, but even I understand why she went to the party. Since she had already graduated college, I’m guessing she had attended a lot of parties without incident and had more tolerance for alcohol back then.

    And don’t put words in my mouth: I never said she went to protect anyone. That’s all you.

  36. You know, that’s part of what gets me: the notion that the victim said, “I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.”

    Sorry, but your susceptibility to alcohol is a function of your body mass and chemistry, not whether you are in school. Unless she lost a lot of weight since she was in college — which is always possible — her tolerance was not significantly different. It was simply the outcome that was different.

  38. “….It is a man’s duty to protect a helpless woman from harm by others…”

    White Knight Nonsense. Unless they are part of your family YOUR duty is to yourself.
    They are Strong and Independent and therefore perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

  42. You can underestimate what gets you drunk. I did in my 20s. But since you are the epitome of perfection, I assume you’ve never done that.

  43. Hail, oh perfect one. I’ll call Pope Francis and see if that old Jesuit has a place for you in the calendar of saints.

    The rest of us mere mortals, however, sometimes underestimated what would get us drunk or how drunk we were in our 20s. In fact, we did a lot of stupid shit in our 20s that we’d like to forget.

    But since you were at home knitting–not a thought of whacking off or taking a sip of demon liquor–you might not get that.

  44. Actually, you can develop a tolerance to alcohol, up to a point. I remember what I used to put away at college, and two years later I could not drink the same amount for love or money. Of course, I had gotten a job in the interim and settled down to being a more responsible human being. You don’t go to keggers when you have to get up at 6:00am. The less you drink, the less tolerance you have.

  45. The comments of Mr Turner’s father have drawn a lot of ire. I understand that a father would be far more concerned about his son than the victim, but what needs to be asked, very publicly, is how this wonderful and loving father managed to rear a son who would have done this in the first place.

  47. Cut the theatrics, snowflake. No one is arguing that you might not have once possibly over-imbibed. But this was stupuid drunk. You don’t get there by accident. Pretending otherwise is just goofy.

    As for the pope and his jesuits, you can keep the commie. I’m Baptist, thanks.

  48. Oh look, another idiot troll followed me over here. Wombat, this clueless twit has been following me around and is now dropping turds here. Please show it the door.

  50. Scared aren’t you? I thought you were the big bad comment guy who puts flamethrowers to dissenters?

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