The six-month sentence for the 20-year-old has created a firestorm of controversy.
The extremely light sentence of a Stanford University student athlete convicted in the sexual assault of a young woman has sent shockwaves across the country since the punishment was handed down.
Brock Allen Turner is a former Stanford University swimmer who was convicted of sexually assaulting a young woman behind a dumpster after he met her at a party.
In court, the student’s father, Dan stoked further tension when he said of his son: "His life will never be the one he dreamed about... That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action."
Victim's rights advocates could not believe it when the 20-year-old was sentenced to just six months in jail instead of the maximum 14 years behind bars. The judge cited the fact that Turner had to forfeit a swimming scholarship to the prestigious university.
The Guardian discovered that Judge Aaron Persky is a Stanford alumnus and will face a recall led by Michele Dauber, a law professor at the prestigious California institute of higher learning.
Prof. Dauber told The New York Times: "If you’re going to declare that a high-achieving perpetrator is an unusual case, then you’re saying to women on college campuses that they don’t deserve the full protection of the law in the state of California."
Additionally, a Change.org petition has more than 240,000 signatures demanding Persky’s recall.
The statement by Turner’s victim continues to get attention around the world.
CNN’s Ashley Bandfield choked up as she read the 7,000-word statement on her show.
In the account, the victim said: “I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.”
The victim said she had no recollection of what happened the night of the attack.
She also wrote: "All that I was told was that I had been found behind a dumpster, potentially penetrated by a stranger, and that I should get retested for HIV because results don’t always show up immediately.”
Read: Pregnant Through Rape, Women Are Forced To Share Child Custody With Their Attackers
The victim also described what it was like not telling her boyfriend about the incident and how she discovered about what happened to her on the night of January 17, 2015.
She was at work when she came across an article that detailed her attack.
“I read and learned for the first time about how I was found unconscious, with my hair disheveled, long necklace wrapped around my neck, bra pulled out of my dress, dress pulled off over my shoulders and pulled up above my waist, that I was butt naked all the way down to my boots, legs spread apart, and had been penetrated by a foreign object by someone I did not recognize. This was how I learned what happened to me, sitting at my desk reading the news at work,” she wrote.
In a statement Monday, Stanford University said it “takes the issue of sexual assault extremely seriously.”
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