Politicians and celebrities, including US Vice President Joe Biden, joined the outpouring of support for the victim in the Stanford University sexual assault case, in which the attacker received a six-month jail sentence widely criticised as too lenient.
The online community has reacted with anger to the sentence Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky handed down last week on former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner (20) in the sexual assault of an unconscious woman in January 2015. Prosecutors had sought a six-year prison term for Turner.
BuzzFeed on Thursday published an open letter by Biden addressing the victim.
"I am filled with furious anger - both that this happened to you and that our culture is still so broken that you were ever put in the position of defending your own worth," he wrote.
Republican US Representative Ted Poe from Texas called for Persky to be removed from office and demanded the sentence be overturned in favor of harsher punishment.
"The punishment for rape should be longer than a semester of college," Poe, a former judge, said in the House of Representatives.
The uproar over the sentence, fuelled partly by the victim's statement detailing the assault in graphic terms, is part of the growing outrage about rape on US college campuses.
Officials have said Persky has received death threats since imposing the sentence. A Santa Clara County Court spokesman has said Persky is prohibited from commenting on the case because Turner is appealing his conviction.
On Wednesday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio posted a live video to his Facebook page of several people, including his wife, Chirlane McCray, and actress Cynthia Nixon, reading the 12-page letter the victim read in court addressing her attacker.
Actress Lena Dunham offered support for the victim on her Twitter page on Wednesday, posting a video about sexual assault.
I dedicate this to the brave survivor in the Stanford case who has given so much to change the conversation. https://t.co/KMOJUxvPu0
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) June 8, 2016
Brie Larson, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a character who is kidnapped and raped in the movie Room, tweeted that Persky was "on the wrong side of history."
The case also struck a nerve internationally. Social media users in China have begun protesting Turner's sentence on the networking site Weibo, BuzzFeed reported on Thursday. The Weibo posts frequently include images of women holding signs with messages of indignation.
"It is rape when she's unconscious," one sign reads. "It is still rape when he is a good swimmer."
BAND DROPPED AFTER LETTER OF SUPPORT
An all-female Ohio band has been dropped from a New York music festival and other venues after its drummer wrote a character letter supporting Brock Turner.
Leslie Rasmussen's letter to the court described Turner as "respectful and caring, talented, and smart enough to know better." She said she had known him since elementary school and he was not a monster.
"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," the 20-year-old wrote. "I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn't right."
Her letter was published online by New York Magazine on Monday and attracted such anger online that the band deleted its Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages.
After Rasmussen's letter was made public, her punk-rock band was dropped from Brooklyn's Northside Festival. Organisers said on Facebook, "Due to recent information brought to our attention, Good English is no longer playing" at the event.
Good English was scheduled to play on Saturday at Brooklyn's Industry City Distillery. Brooklyn's Bar Matchless also said the band had been removed from its schedule.
"We did not want to be associated or even seen as passively approving the band or its viewpoints," Ronak Parikh, head of sales and operations at Industry City Distillery, said.
On Tuesday Rasmussen apologised on her Facebook page.
She wrote that she understood why people would "misconstrue my ideas into a distortion that suggests I sympathize with sex offenses and those who commit them or that I blame the victim involved."
"Nothing could be farther from the truth, and I apologize for anything my statement has done to suggest that I don't feel enormous sympathy for the victim and her suffering."
