Blame booze, not judge, in Stanford sexual assault case

Recently I received a mass email from a law professor in California soliciting money for an effort to have a local judge removed. Judge Aaron Persky had sentenced what the professor called “an elite athlete at Stanford University, to only six months in prison for three counts of sexual assault,” offending left-thinking enemies of college sports everywhere.

By the time professor Michele Dauber’s indignant message arrived, the offending elitist, 19-year-old freshman Brock Turner -- who swam the 200- and 500-meter freestyle -- had been banished from the Stanford campus, given a lifetime ban from U.S. swimming events, required to register as a felony sex offender and sent to jail. Not exactly a walk in the park.

Ah, but a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy: the ideal villain in the neverending quest for the Perfect Campus Rape tale.

Assuming Brock Turner is capable of learning from experience, it’s a good bet he won’t be fumbling about in drunk girls’ underwear any- more. That was the judge’s stated rationale. Following a (female) California probation officer’s recommendation, he thought Turner unlikely to re-offend.

Neither under California law nor common parlance did Turner commit rape. Nor, contrary to an indignant Washington Post columnist, did the swimmer “drag” the victim anywhere. She’d left the party with him willingly. He had absolutely no right to paw her. However, it’s tricky enough adjudicating murky sexual encounters without fictive add-ons.

Immediately before sentencing, Turner said he couldn’t forgive himself for imposing undeserved “trauma and pain” on the victim, and vowed never “to have a drop of alcohol again.” Of course, he’d earlier described the victim writhing, moaning and urging him on. So his apology failed to persuade. “At no time did it ever occur to me,” he told the court, “or did it ever seem that (she) was too drunk to know what we were doing.”

For her part, the anonymous victim, age 22, whose own highly emotional statement got read aloud over the air by CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield -- consuming a full 40 minutes of air time -- remembered nothing whatsoever. But she refuses to believe she acted like the “seductive party animal” (her words) that he described.

“Usually there’s a natural progression of things, unfolding consensually,” she explained, “not a Q and A ... Maybe I was still fluttering my eyes and wasn’t completely limp yet. Fine. His guilt did not depend on him knowing the exact second that I became unconscious, that is never what this was about. I was slurring, too drunk to consent way before I was on the ground.”

Indeed, her blood alcohol content was measured at 0.25 -- three times the legal driving limit. (His was 0.19.) It’s reminiscent of the toga party scene in “Animal House” when the mayor’s high school daughter passes out, and a tiny angel and a devil debate what to do. How acute is one party animal’s judgment about another’s degree of impairment expected to be?

During her statement, the victim explained that having graduated from college -- she’d attended the Stanford frat party with her little sister -- she was out of the practice of binge-drinking, and never intended to end up out among the pine trees with a freshman.

What excited sympathetic TV stars, however, appears to have been her histrionic account of her hidden wounds. She spoke of her mother, her sister and herself weeping uncontrollably. “My damage was internal, unseen,” she said. “I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.”

I found her ruined-Victorianmaiden tone self-defeating.

So I answered the California professor’s donation request with a