UPDATED: Rock trio pulled from festival lineup for drummer’s support of Stanford rapist
If you’ve been paying any attention to the news and/or social media over the past few days, you probably already know the name Brock Turner. If not, here’s a refresher: Turner is a 20-year-old Stanford student recently convicted of raping a 23-year-old woman as she lay unconscious behind a dumpster after a party last January. Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault, but the judge, Aaron Persky, let Turner off with an absurdly light six-month sentence—of which he’ll reportedly only serve a few months in a county jail—out of concern for the “severe impact” a long jail sentence might have on the poor boy’s future. And people are pissed.
The victim released a powerful statement on the “severe impact” she experienced last week, which was followed by a jaw-dropping statement from Turner’s father about how his son just doesn’t have the happy-go-lucky attitude he used to now that he’s a fucking rapist. Then there was a statement from one of Turner’s lifelong friends, Leslie Rasmussen, which basically blames the whole thing on political correctness gone wild. In the letter, Rasmussen defends Turner’s character, asserting he’s “not a monster” and was “always the sweetest to everyone.” She adds:
I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.
This is completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot. That is a rapist. These are not rapists. These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgement.
Well, guess what, everybody—Rasmussen’s the drummer and vocalist in a band. And that band, the Dayton, Ohio-based garage-punk trio Good English, was scheduled to play at the Brooklyn-based Northside Festival this week. Emphasis on the “was,” because according to Paste and a number of other sources, Good English has been dropped from the festival lineup in response to Rasmussen’s statement. The festival acknowledges the change in a terse tweet: