It was somewhat understandable, if very wrong, that the outraged villagers with Michelle Dauber holding the pitchfork and leading the mob would persist in their obsessive need to demonize Brock Turner, to do what they could to destroy him. This isn’t because he’s such a swell guy, or that his conduct was insignificant, but because he’s become a target of women suffering from some bizarre compulsion. Call it the Turner Syndrome.
[W]omen in the Dayton, Ohio area have revived the story in a sort of “whisper network” using TikTok and Facebook to warn each other about Turner, who is now 27.
“Brock Turner is now living in the Dayton, Ohio, area,” says one recent Facebook post. “He is frequenting bars in the area. Do not let him leave with an intoxicated woman. Inform the women of who he is. Inform the bartender, bouncers. Brock Turner does not belong in public.”
Another post reads, “Please tell your female and femme-presenting friends, family members, co-workers, literally everyone. This man does not deserve peace.”
These aren’t women who have any connection to Turner or anyone associated with the case, and yet six years after his notoriously short sentence that ended in Judge Aaron Persky’s recall, they remain obsessed with destroying Brock Turner. There’s probably a long German word for this mental state.
It’s not entirely clear why this is happening now, though as Vice notes it could be as simple as Turner having to re-register on a sex offenders’ registry. It could also be that women have recently met him in social situations and Googled him. But some have even taken to sharing his home address and encouraging others to egg his house.
The Daily Beast points to posts suggesting that Turner has recently “moved back” to Ohio, but it seems as though Turner has lived in the state for years now.
It’s almost as if supportive media is making stuff up to try to make this appear more normal and less batshit crazy.
The Turner case, though, clearly continues to spark outrage, and the fact that Turner can go on to live a normal life of picking up women in bars is unacceptable to many. To be clear, there have been no further accusations against Turner since the Stanford incident. But that hardly matters to the woman posting on TikTok and elsewhere who see the case as another in which the justice system failed them, and their only recourse is to publicly call out Turner’s presence in their midst and continue to make him a pariah.
There have been many cases, vastly worse than Turner’s, worthy of some concern if these women need someone to hate with a burning passion that will make them forget the emptiness of their own pathetic lives, but they nonetheless obsess over Turner who did his time, brief though it was, and has done nothing since to warrant attention, anger or random women on tiktok urging random people to egg his house, because they’re the virtuous ones.
The question of second chances is a fair one, but one impediment is the disease that makes random people willing to do harm to people they have nothing to do with and who have done nothing to them. Why the Turner Syndrome exists may be unclear, but as this demonstrates, it surely does.
H/T Chris Halkides