It is what it is (or is it?)

Even though I have another post to publish, this is more timely and important.  It is something I shared today on another platform but is fitting for this space, too.  I am enraged at the Brock Turner sentence, at the judge who imposed it and is complicit in perpetuating our rape culture, and at his father who had a hand in parenting him into becoming a rapist but who asked for leniency because, hey, his son won’t even eat steak anymore.

If you know me, you know I am passionate about a number of issues, and women’s rights, women’s equality, and protecting women from men that seek to do them harm is at the top of the list. I am going to reveal something that maybe two people who will read this know: I WAS RAPED in my dorm room during my first week as a freshman at LMU. The perpetrator was a friend of someone in one of the guys dorms. We’d all been drinking, he followed me back to my dorm room, locked the door behind us as we entered the darkened room, pushed me down onto the bed, pinned my arms over my head, put his mouth over my mouth so that I couldn’t scream and raped me. Perhaps my only life regret is that I never reported it.

That this affluent, 6+ ft tall, 200+ lb white basketball player assaulted me and that I didn’t report it may have led to other women being assaulted. It wasn’t OK. I didn’t ‘ask’ for it. It wasn’t about what I was wearing, or whether he thought I was flirting with him, but it was about assault and power and violence and non-consensual sex.

That was 30 yrs ago. What Brock Turner and his like did and do every day across this country is criminal. When men are convicted and judges don’t impose fitting sentences for the crimes they commit, ALL women suffer, that means your mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, friends and daughters. We have to care MORE about his victim, the destruction of her life, the safety he took from her than we EVER do about what becomes of him.

Now you know why I am SO riled up. If you are, too, this petition has 371,000 of 450,000 needed signatures to recall Judge Persky. Consider adding your name.