Brock Turner (here on referred to as The Stanford Rapist) gets six months in jail. Okay, fine. But that’s not where his sentence ends. No, that’s sort of like a warm up for the real sentence he’s about to get. For anyone thinking he got off with a light punishment, hang on a sec because while you wish he got more, he should be wishing for the same thing. See, six months in jail isn’t long enough for this to “blow over” or for people to forget about it. Six months still leaves it fresh enough in everyone’s minds that they’ll still remember it when he gets out. That six months is protection for him because once he gets back out into the world, he’s a marked man. If he hasn’t already received death threats, I’m sure they’ll follow soon. Here’s what the rest of his life will look like.
After his six months of protection, he’ll be returned to the real world where he might think he can go back to school and finish his degree. Not so fast. As soon as he steps foot on any campus, he will be subject to silence and sideways glances. If his friends aren’t ex-friends by now, they’ll slowly phase him out of their lives since they won’t want to be associated with him in any way. Who wants to be friends with a rapist? When he walks into a classroom he will take his seat in the back where hopefully no one will notice him because at this point, he will do anything for anonymity. A few people might notice his sorry dump of a body trying to hide and they’ll point, and they’ll whisper and maybe they’ll say something but he will gradually begin to break until he accepts that he is all alone.
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Now let’s say somehow he finishes his degree. Anyone who has ever applied for a job knows that the application always asks about felony convictions. The Stanford Rapist will have to fill that part out and try to explain to anyone who may have forgotten about his “20 minutes of action” that he was convicted of sexual assault. I’m sure the interviewer (should he make it that far in the process) will attempt to be nice and hear him out but that’s just a formality. The person responsible for hiring already knows that he/she won’t be calling back to hire a rapist. Why would any company hire a convicted rapist to work in their environment?
Having no job, nowhere to go and no one to talk to, Brock will have to finally accept the gravity of his situation. By now, people will start to forget about his past life but if he was smart, he’d keep looking over his shoulder just in case. His parents will do all they can to support him, especially deadbeat daddy. Here’s all I will say about him: he has failed completely as a father. He didn’t teach his son about right and wrong. He taught him that he can have whatever he wants and to not take “no” for an answer. Daddy can live with the fact that he is a failure of a father in every sense of what a father should be. But he’s not important. So let’s talk about the mom, the one who gave birth to him, the one who will never look at her son the same way again. She won’t see the boy she raised. She won’t see the innocent little kid who wanted to be “insert desired profession here.” Instead she’ll see her son, the rapist. The one who did something so depraved to someone with just as much humanity as her. She will feel repulsed. I wonder how The Stanford Rapist will feel when even his own mother can’t look him in the eye and thinks of him as some sort of mistake. Wait, I don’t care. No one will care. The Stanford Rapist will exist in a world that has written him off.
I hope that this is one story the 24 hour media cycle doesn’t bury too soon. I hope they’ll be there on the day of his release and then everyday after that just so we can all see the downward spiral that’s coming. I hope they knock on his door constantly and ask how he’s doing and all he can do is look back at them with broken, defeated eyes with no answer for what was once such a routine question.
Six months is a short time to be in jail for rape. Too short, yes but The Stanford Rapist had better hope and pray that he serves the full six months just to give himself a fighting chance of survival when he’s out. He’s dead to rights. He’s condemned forever. He took someone’s humanity so the collective force of anyone outraged by this will enact true justice by taking his. He will be crucified and it will be done publicly. Society will not be kind to him because they think with emotion and right now that emotion should not be disappointment in our justice system or shame. It should be burning, seething anger. The Stanford Rapist may think he got off easy and many people will share that same thought. In reality, his life is over; he just hasn’t realized it yet.
