Brock Turner claimed to remember what happened that night, and that at every step of the way Emily Doe was a willing participant. But that is the story he told at his trial, after months of prepping and strategizing with his lawyers. On the night of his arrest, as he sat in shock in the interview room of the local police station, he had none of that certainty about Emily Doe.
Q: Were you guys hooking up there before or—before you even moved over?
Turner: I think so. But I’m not sure when we started kissing, honestly.
Then the police officer asks him why he ran when the two graduate students discovered him and Emily Doe on the ground.
Turner: I don’t think I ran.
Q: You don’t remember running?
Turner: No.
Keep in mind that the event in question just happened earlier that night, and that even as he is speaking, Turner is nursing an injured wrist from when he was tackled as he tried to escape. But it’s all gone.
Q: Did you get a look at her while she—this was going on, while the guys were approaching you and talking to you?
Turner: No.
Q: Is it possible she was unresponsive at that point?
Turner: Honestly, I don’t know, because I—like, I really don’t remember. Like, I—I think I was kind of blacked out after, uh, like, from the point of me going—like, hooking up to her, to, like, me being on the ground with the other guys. Like, I really don’t remember how that happened.
I think I was kind of blacked out. So the whole story about flirting and kissing and Emily Doe agreeing to go back to his dorm was a fiction: it was what he hoped had happened. What actually happened will be forever a mystery. Maybe Turner and Emily Doe just stood there on the dance floor, repeating the same things to each other, over and over again, without realizing that they were trapped in an infinite, blacked-out loop.
At the end of the trial, Emily Doe read a letter out loud to the court, addressed to Brock Turner. Every young man and woman who goes to a bar or a fraternity party should read Emily Doe’s letter. It is brave and eloquent and a powerful reminder of the consequences of sexual assault: that what happens between two strangers, in the absence of real consent, causes genuine pain and suffering.
What happened that night, she said, shattered her:
My independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty. The isolation at times was unbearable.
At work she would show up late, then go and cry in the stairwell. She would cry herself to sleep at night and in the morning hold refrigerated spoons to her eyes to lessen the swelling.
I can’t sleep alone at night without having a light on, like a five-year-old, because I have nightmares of being touched where I cannot wake up. I did this thing where I waited until the sun came up and I felt safe enough to sleep. For three months, I went to bed at six o’clock in the morning.
I used to pride myself on my independence; now I am afraid to go on walks in the evening, to attend social events with drinking among friends where I should be comfortable being. I have become a little barnacle always needing to be at someone’s side, to have my boyfriend standing next to me, sleeping beside me, protecting me. It is embarrassing how feeble I feel, how timidly I move through life, always guarded, ready to defend myself, ready to be angry.
Then she comes to the question of alcohol. Was it a factor in what happened that night? Of course. But then she says:
Alcohol was not the one who stripped me, fingered me, had my head dragging against the ground, with me almost fully naked. Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone close to them who has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much. Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault. We were both drunk. The difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately, and run away. That’s the difference.
In his own statement to the court, Turner had said he was hoping to set up a program for students to “speak out against the campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.” Doe was scathing:
Campus drinking culture. That’s what we’re speaking out against? You think that’s what I’ve spent the past year fighting for? Not awareness about campus sexual assault, or rape, or learning to recognize consent. Campus drinking culture. Down with Jack Daniels. Down with Skyy Vodka. If you want to talk to people about drinking, go to an AA meeting. You realize, having a drinking problem is different than drinking and then forcefully trying to have sex with someone? Show men how to respect women, not how to drink less.
But that’s not quite right, is it? That last line should be “Show men how to respect women and how to drink less,” because the two things are connected. Brock Turner was asked to do something of crucial importance that night—to make sense of a stranger’s desires and motivations. That is a hard task for all of us under the best circumstances, because the assumption of transparency we rely on in those encounters is so flawed. Asking a drunk and immature nineteen-year-old to do that, in the hypersexualized chaos of a frat party, is an invitation to disaster.
The outcome of People v. Brock Turner brought a measure of justice to Emily Doe. But so long as we refuse to acknowledge what alcohol does to the interaction between strangers, that evening at Kappa Alpha will be repeated again. And again.
P: You’ve heard that voice mail of [Emily], haven’t you?
Turner: Yes.
Turner is being cross-examined by the prosecutor. She’s referring to the slurred phone call Emily Doe made to her boyfriend sometime after she blacked out.
P: You would agree with me that in that voice mail, she sounds super intoxicated?
Turner: Yes.
P: That’s how she was with you that night, wasn’t she?
Turner: Yes.
P: She was very drunk, wasn’t she?
Turner: Not more than anybody else that I had been with.
1 At the time of the incident, her blood-alcohol concentration was .249. His BAC was .171. She was three times the legal limit. He was twice the legal limit. These BAC numbers are according to expert-witness testimony.
2 A group of Canadian psychologists led by Tara MacDonald recently went into a series of bars and asked the patrons to read a short vignette. They were to imagine that they had met an attractive person at a bar, walked him or her home, and ended up in bed—only to discover that neither of them had a condom. The subjects were then asked to respond on a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 9 (very likely) to the proposition: “If I were in this situation, I would have sex.” You’d think that the subjects who had been drinking heavily would be more likely to say they would have sex—and that’s exactly what happened. The drunk people came in at 5.36, on average, on the 9-point scale. The sober people came in at 3.91. The drinkers couldn’t sort through the long-term consequences of unprotected sex. But then MacDonald went back to the bars and stamped the hands of some of the patrons with the phrase “AIDS kills.” Drinkers with the hand stamp were slightly less likely than the sober people to want to have sex in that situation: they couldn’t sort through the rationalizations necessary to set aside the risk of AIDS. Where norms and standards are clear and obvious, the drinker can become more rule-bound than his sober counterpart.