Vice President Biden proclaims Stanford rape survivor a ‘warrior’
Vice President Joe Biden told the woman whose sexual assault case at Stanford University provoked a national firestorm that she is a “warrior” who has been failed by many people and institutions, in an open letter to the victim.
Biden did not directly address the six-month county jail sentence handed down to former Stanford student Brock Allen Turner by a Santa Clara County judge, which victims’ rights advocates denounced as a slap on the wrist.
In the letter made public Thursday, Biden told the woman that “a lot of people failed you” the night she was attacked while she was unconscious outside a fraternity party in January 2015, “and in the months after.”
“Anyone at that party who saw that you were incapacitated yet looked the other way and did not offer assistance,” Biden wrote in the letter, which his office provided to the website BuzzFeed.
The case became national news when the victim’s searing account of the attack and the trauma it caused her, some of which she read in court before Turner’s sentencing, was released in its 7,244-word entirety by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office last week.
The judge has reportedly received anonymous death threats, and some potential jurors have refused to serve on trials assigned to him.
The vice president’s office says he appointed the first-ever White House adviser on violence against women and has “focused specifically on strengthening efforts to reduce dating violence against students, teens, and young women ages 16-24.”
In her statement, the victim described waking up in a hospital after a fraternity party she attended with her sister, and learning the details of her assault days later from news reports.
Turner, a former high school swimming champion, was convicted of three felony charges: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person, and penetration of an unconscious person.
In handing down the six-month sentence, Persky said he had weighed Turner’s lack of criminal history, character and demonstration of remorse.