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Brock Turner's Mom Blocks Cameras As Her Son Signs A Sex Offender Registry
I get it, Mrs. Turner. I totally get it. Everybody wants to protect their kids. We're moms here, you and me, so I feel you. Except... I don't know. Not to be that judgmental schoolyard mom or anything, but I feel like Brock Turner's mom might have misjudged the response to her actions a little here. Brock Turner's mom blocked cameras on Tuesday as her son signed a sex offender registry following his sexual assault conviction three months earlier, and a little part of me wonders if she is fully comprehending the irony in that act. Protecting her son from the consequences of his heinous actions seems to be a shade off the mark in this situation.
Carleen Turner, mother of Brock Turner, has again made the internet a little angry with what many see as another moment of blatant white privilege. When her son was charged with raping an unconscious fellow Stanford student, Carleen wrote a letter to Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky, who was residing over the case, begging him not to send her son to prison (although in no way refuting that her son had raped an unconscious young woman). An excerpt from her letter read:
I beg of you, please don’t send him to jail/prison. 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.
On Tuesday, Carleen Turner again tried to shield her wayward son from the consequences of his actions by, well, literally shielding him. With, like, her body and shirt and stuff. According to NBC News, she covered the window with a white sheet as well to protect her son from prying eyes.
Turner, whose light six-month sentence as a convicted sex felon outraged millions of people across the country (many blaming sexism, a college environment that is conducive to rape culture, and white privilege among other things), was at the Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office to register as on official sex offender. He started his six-month sentence on June 2, and was finished on Sept. 2. Essentially the same length of time as the average school kid's summer vacation.
While Turner's parents continue to protect their son (Dan Turner infamously wrote to Judge Persky that his son should hardly be punished for "20 minutes of action in a 20-plus year life"), they must be finding the situation at home difficult. Angry neighbors have been seen protesting outside the family's Ohio home, some of them armed. Not to mention, as Carleen Turner so eloquently put it in her letter to Judge Persky, they're dealing with the shattered hopes and dreams of her son, the blessed child of a "working middle-class couple with Midwestern values":
He has never been in trouble, never even had a demerit in high school, he studied, swam worked hard. 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.
Yet still no mention of the victim.
It's almost as though the Turner's have forgotten she exists, in their efforts to shield their child — in this case literally — from consequences. Unfortunately for them, the internet has not forgotten.
