Northside Fest Cuts Band Whose Drummer Defended Stanford Rapist
Brooklyn’s Northside Festival has dropped Dayton garage rockers Good English from its lineup in light of the fact that the band’s drummer wrote a letter in support of the Stanford rapist Brock Turner.
Turner was convicted of three counts of sexual assault in California for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster on Stanford’s campus in 2015. He received a light sentence of six months in county jail with probation after Judge Aaron Persky said he worried a longer sentence would have a “severe impact” on the Olympic-caliber swimmer. The day after the ruling, Turner’s now 23-year-old victim shared her lengthy, harrowing court statement via Buzzfeed, and since then, some unsavory messages of support for the defendant have come to light, including an especially repugnant Facebook status published by Turner’s father. Another is a letter written to Judge Persky by Turner’s childhood friend Leslie Rasmussen (pictured above on the right), who just so happens to drum alongside her sisters in Good English. The Cut published her letter in full yesterday after it was originally exposed on Twitter. Here is an excerpt:
Brock is not a monster. He is the furthest thing from anything like that, and I have known him much longer than the people involved in his case. I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.
Good English were scheduled to play four Brooklyn venues in affiliation with Northside Festival, but after the festival and participating venues received a barrage of criticism online for hosting the band, they cut them from the bill.
Due to recent information brought to our attention, Good English is no longer playing Northside Festival.
— Northside Festival (@NorthsideFest) June 7, 2016
@charmingfoxes Good English is not playing our show, removed yesterday from lineup, zero tolerance for the act or the justifying of the act
— ICD (@drinkicd) June 7, 2016
Industry City Distillery and Bar Matchless — two venues at which Good English were scheduled to perform — posted statements to their Facebook pages castigating rape apologists. The band’s hometown Dayton Music Art And Film Festival dropped Good English from its September lineup as well, writing on Facebook that “such actions should not be defended, friend or not.”
UPDATE: Rasmussen has shared a statement via the band’s Facebook (H/T James)…