The case of Brock Turner, the former Stanford swimmer (now banned from the sport for life) who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, keeps getting worse. Aside from the lenient sentence Turner was granted, the letters that he, his father, and his close personal friend (all blaming “party culture”) submitted to the court, and the revelations that the judge presiding over the case has a history of blaming victims, new information suggests that Turner didn’t just physically assault his victim. He may have taken pictures of her body and shared them with people on group chat.
According to Cosmopolitan, Turner may have actually been caught twice on the night he assaulted his unnamed victim. The two latter witnesses — Peter Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, the two Swedish men who chased him down and detained him until the police came — are well-documented. But a report released by the Santa Clara Sheriff’s office explains that another witness may have come up on Turner taking pictures of his victim before the two men did. If that’s the case, then Turner didn’t just assault his victim — he assaulted her, took pictures, ran away, and then came back to continue the assault.
From the report, which features the account of a person visiting Stanford who came upon someone (possibly Turner), standing over the victim with a “bright light.”
While police don’t yet know if the man with the cell phone was Turner, they’re absolutely following the reports provided by the witness to ascertain whether he did, in fact, take and share pictures of the unconscious woman. And, as Cosmopolitan points out, there are several good reasons why the man may have been Turner (including the fact that he’d been exhibiting predatory behaviors even before the assault).
First, Turner’s phone received a message from the GroupMe app asking “who’s t*ts are those” (a screenshot on the phone shows the actual message as “WHOS T*T IS THAT”). Police took a screenshot of the phone but were unable to recover any more information once they got a search warrant. While the lack of pictures might suggest that there weren’t any to begin with, it’s also possible that the photos and messages were deleted by someone else involved in the group text, something that is apparently an option.
Second, this text is in line with the evidence from the night of the attack. As noted by Cosmopolitan, when the police initially discovered the victim, they found her bra “disheveled.” It had been lifted above her left breast. That evidence, coupled with the text message (especially the fact that only one breast is referenced), is leading investigators to believe that Turner may have violated his victim in even more ways than already reported.