A letter Brock Turner's mom submitted to the judge just prior to the sentencing of her son has gone public.
As previously detailed, Turner was convicted in March on three felony counts of sexual assault:
Sexual penetration of an unconscious person; sexual penetration of an intoxicated person; and intent to rape an unconscious or intoxicated person.
A jury determined that the former Stanford University swimmer had assaulted an unconscious woman near a dumpster during a party in January of 2015.
Turner was eligible to be sentenced to 14 years in state prison for his crime, but the case has gone viral because the judge only sentenced him to six months in county jail.
It was also gone viral due to a number of statements that have been made.
The first was made in court by the unnamed victim, who managed to collect her thoughts and outline the specific ways in which Turner has impacted her life.
You can hear her brave, powerful message in its entirety below:
The second message was a letter written by Turner's father, in which he defends his son's actions and pleads with the judge to give him no jail time at all.
In this letter, Mr. Turner refers to the rape as "20 minutes of action" that should not run his son's life.
Turner himself, meanwhile, also pleaded with Judge Aaron Persy, who attended Stanford himself and also played collegiate athletics there.
In his statement, Turner blamed his actions on a culture of "binge drinking and sexual promiscuity."
Critics have been aghast at the way the judge, Turner and his father all minimized this 20-year old's actions, basically turning him into the victim over the actual victim herself.
And now we can add Turner's mother to this same despicable list.
Prior to Persky's June 2 sentencing, Carleen Turner, pleaded with the Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge to go very easy on her child.
"I beg of you, please don't send him to jail/prison," she wrote.
Look at him. He won't survive it. He will be damaged forever and I fear he would be a major target. Stanford boy, college kid, college athlete - all the publicity. This would be a death sentence for him."
It should not even be necessary for us to comment here, but it's nearly impossible to help ourselves:
Mrs. Turner is using her son's privileged status as an argument for why he should NOT be jailed... for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.
"He has never been in trouble, never even had a demerit in high school, he studied, swam worked hard," she continued.
"His dreams have been shattered by this. No NCAA Championships. No Stanford degree, no swimming in the Olympics (and I honestly know he would have made a future team), no medical school, no becoming an Orthopedic surgeon."
Again, to be clear:
Mrs. Turner is attempting to garner sympathy for someone who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman, somehow managing to completely ignore that Brock Turner only has himself to blame for the above "dreams" being "shattered."
He was found guilty of rape.
Mrs. Turner does not mention the victim one time in her letter.
"I know what a broken heart feels like. It is a physical pain that starts just below the collar bone and extends to below the rib cage, it is a crushing and heavy ache that feels like I am being squeezed," she wrote.
"This feeling has not left my body since the verdict. This verdict has destroyed us."
On some level, we can understand a mother's blind love for her child.
But on every other level, it would have been nice if she stopped to consider how the victim felt while her son was assaulting her.
How she has been destroyed by this is all that matters.
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