Dear Gossips,
I’m sorry to have to do this today but there’s a chance some of you may not have heard about it so we have to talk about Brock Allen Turner, the convicted sex offender. The last time Brock Turner came up in this space, it was back in December when his lawyers filed an appeal, arguing that his conviction should be overturned because during the trial, prosecutors kept referring to the “dumpster”, which is where he was found raping Emily Doe. Their claim is that the repeated references to the “dumpster” unfairly suggested “moral depravity, callousness, and culpability on the appellant’s part because of the inherent connotations of filth, garbage, detritus and criminal activity frequently generally associated with dumpsters”.
So the court is supposed to ignore the fact that Emily Doe was unconscious, that the witnesses were so broken by what they saw, one of them burst into tears giving his statement to police, and focus on a goddamn technicality – that the rape occurred maybe beside the dumpster and not behind it, never mind why she was anywhere near it to begin with, you f-cking asshole.
Brock’s legal team isn’t done being creative. On Tuesday, Brock’s lawyer, Eric Malthaup, argued in appeals court that Brock wasn’t naked during the assault, which means he couldn’t have possibly raped her. They’re instead positing that what happened between the two of them was actually “outercourse”, a form of “safe sex”. Seriously. This actually happened. A man with a law degree actually said this, in front of three judges, and willingly had it entered into court record.
“It’s just breathtaking in its cruelty,” said Anne Coughlin, a University of Virginia law professor. “It feels like a juvenile, adolescent joke that utterly denies the extent of the injury that was proved at the trial. It’s just awful.”
“Breathtaking cruelty” is an excellent description. That’s exactly what this is: CRUELTY. Cruelty is inhumane. This defence is an act against humanity. To deny Emily Doe’s right to decide who gets to be on top of her body, thrusting on her body, jamming his finger into her body, to deny her pain, on the basis of what her rapist was wearing, is a violation of human decency. And devastatingly ironic – that what a woman wears and doesn’t wear is often weaponised against her and that now, what a man wears, can also be weaponised against her.
What Brock and his lawyer are trying to tell us is that the next time some dude has you unconscious on the ground and is fingering you, if he’s got his pants on, it’s not only totally OK, he’s actually doing you a favour because you won’t get pregnant and you won’t get an STI so, you know, you should be thanking him instead of suing him, because what more do you want out of life, right? Be satisfied with that extraordinary act of generosity, you ungrateful bitches.
Don’t tell me this is an exaggeration. Because if they manage to make this f-cksh-t of a defence happen, it becomes a precedent. And it’s not like it isn’t already hard enough to make a rape charge stick. Ask R Kelly.
According to the Associated Press, the appellate court justices “appeared skeptical of (Brock Turner’s lawyer’s) argument”. Well that’s temporarily reassuring. But given how determined Brock and his family seem to be in their efforts to fight this conviction, and how determined people seem to be to remind us of how he was identified before he became a CONVICTED SEX OFFENDER, how confident are you that they won’t keep pushing? Most importantly, what effect does all this have on Emily Doe?
During the trial, she had to listen to Brock and his team repeatedly invalidate her trauma. Before sentencing she had to listen to Brock’s team minimise her trauma by calling it “20 minutes of action”. At sentencing she had to accept the judge’s undermining of her trauma by giving her rapist a short summer prison term. And now Brock is trying to legally rebrand her trauma – and the trauma of so many others – as “outercourse” and “safe sex”, like rape was actually, all along, a misunderstood sugar-free soft drink that’s really good for you.
On top of all that, they’re doing it without shame. In official public spaces, wide open spaces, without shame. This, too, is another layer of cruelty. That Brock and his attorneys can mount a defence this outrageous, this insulting, this horrific, and still FEEL SAFE. I sure as f-ck don’t know what that feels like.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
