Twenty Minutes of Action – A Father’s Defense to the Unthinkable

I am watching my daughter become a beautiful young lady. I might be partial, but the heads that turn tell me otherwise.

She is 12. I fear what is to come. I have seen her turn the heads of men who are far older than she is. Clueless in her youth, I want to protect her from so much.

She is a dancer with a beautiful figure. Tiny, petite and graceful… she is shy and modest. She prefers to change her clothes in private, and does not like bikinis.

I pause to watch her sometimes. I am grateful for her. I am grateful for all my children.

She will grow up with all the benefits and love and kindness I can offer to her.

I wish for her all the joy imaginable.

She is intelligent too…. All honors classes. I pray that she can use her talent to do big things in her life. She has a big heart. I tend to think she will want to help people.

I will pack her up and send her to a fine University one day… I will cry my eyes out as she leaves my daily sight. Like the others, I know she will return better for the experience.

This story caught my eye, and the words have been stuck in my throat since.

Dear Stanford Rapist and Father,

No parent gives up the better part of their lives as a parent to raise their daughter so that your drunken son can use her as a vessel.

His “twenty minutes of action” as you call it, do not deserve a long prison sentence? I greatly disagree.  I don’t care about your son’s letter to the Court. I don’t care that his life is ruined. I don’t care that he has daily thoughts about his mistakes. I don’t care. I wish him more of the same.

My wish for that criminal that you raised would be for him to have recurrent thoughts of his crime that haunt him so that he is compelled to scratch his own eyes out so he can no longer see the images of what he did to that young girl. The Judge violated her all over again by this lack of punishment.

The lack of validation by the Court punishes every woman, over and over and deters future victims from coming forward. Your justification as the father of the criminal leave little doubt where your criminal fostered his thought processes. While I agree with the dangers of excessive alcohol, indulging was not the likely cause of his actions that night. In my humble opinion, you raised a criminal because you never taught him to have any respect for women, or for himself, for that matter.

As a victim of date rape in college, I can still remember his forearm across my throat.

That feeling will never completely left my mind, and it has paralyzed me over the years.

The only goodness here is the publicity that your family will receive. I hope it prevents your son from ever reaching the heights he might have reached. I hope it prevents other girls from saying yes to a date, and employers from saying yes to an interview.

I hope that in his brief prison sentence, someone else in that jail teaches him what it feels like to be a victim.  Your skinny twerp of a son will make a nice bitch for someone.

Signed,

Virginia Masters

Thankfully, I have a few years before I send my daughter off to school. I hope in that time, that as a society, we come to understand the crime of rape and the need to believe the victims without stigma, and punish the violators.

Also valuable would be a review of Judicial decisions that fall so far outside the norm of expected sentences.