All indications are that Stanford rapist Brock Turner got a phrase (no, not sentence) of six months in prison in part because of two of the most tone-deaf character letters ever written to an American judge. One of them came from Turner’s childhood friend, who engaged in one of the most shameful acts of victim blaming ever uncovered. The costs of this outrageous letter were severe–the loss, at least temporarily, of her music career. Fortunately, she had the decency to apologize.
Most of the media attention has been focused on the maudlin plea from Turner’s father to consider his son’s emotional load. However, a letter from Leslie Rasmussen, a childhood friend of Turner’s from Oakwood, Ohio–a suburb of Dayton–was far worse. We first learned about it when Stanford law professor Michele Dauber tweeted a sample.
#brockturner court probation report is fetid pond of victim-blaming rapeyness @thehuntinground @hodgman @brielarson pic.twitter.com/hygboyoV9q
— Michele Dauber (@mldauber) June 6, 2016
In the same breath that Rasmussen said she wasn’t blaming the victim, she wrung her hands that Turner was being sentenced on the word of a woman who didn’t know how much she had to drink. As bad as this was, the full letter was even worse. Read it here (hat tip to New York magazine).
Rasmussen noted that Turner and the victim had been flirting for some time at a frat party, and both had been drinking heavily. She then claimed that Turner should have been acquitted because he was “not completely in control of his emotions” when he was thrusting on top of the victim.
It didn’t take long for the costs of Rasmussen’s victim blaming to be felt in full. Rasmussen and her sisters recently formed an indie-rock band, Good English, for whom Leslie is the drummer. They were due to travel to Brooklyn this coming weekend to play at several area bars before playing at the Northside Festival. However, on Tuesday, women’s rights activist Daniele Guercio got wind that the drummer and the letter writer were the same person. She took to social media to urge that Good English be yanked from the bill.
Watch “Inside Edition’s” coverage of the fallout here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x28k9buzmek
Within hours, the venues where Good English was slated to play were bombarded with angry Facebook posts and tweets demanding that the gigs be canceled. By Tuesday night, Bar Matchless and Industry City Distillery had not only canceled their concerts, but issued burning statements condemning victim blaming. Two other bars quietly dropped the band. In at least one case, several protesters threatened to collar the Rasmussens after the concert. That’s as unacceptable as Leslie’s letter. Violence is never appropriate, no matter how abhorrent someone’s views may be.
The Northside Festival followed suit later on; festival founder Daniel Stedman said that by “making right of a wrong,” Rasmussen made yanking her band’s invitation “a no-brainer.” Later that day, the Dayton Music and Arts Festival announced that Good English would not play there in September, saying that “such actions should not be defended, friend or not.”
Good English was forced to delete all of its social media accounts after being bombarded with angry posts. Its Facebook page returned on Tuesday night with a statement from Leslie denouncing her critics for “misconstruing my ideas.” This statement was republished on her personal Facebook page. Um, Leslie? It’s awfully hard to misconstrue a suggestion that Turner shouldn’t have been convicted because he was “not completely in control of his emotions.” Apparently Behind the Curtains Media, the band’s PR firm, came to the same conclusion. It fired Good English on Wednesday. By then, the band’s social media accounts had been deleted again, and have not returned as of Thursday night.
By Wednesday night, Rasmussen apparently realized that she had really stepped in it. She took to Facebook again and issued an unreserved apology for not fully acknowledging “the severity of Brock’s crime and the suffering and pain that his victim endured.” She also said that she now realized she had “much to learn.”
That’s an understatement. Apparently Rasmussen didn’t know or didn’t understand that victim blaming has become a third rail–and the costs for publicly engaging in it can be severe. If this ultimately costs or delays her music career, it should stand as an object lesson for anyone who thinks rape culture is acceptable.
