Kangaroo Court
Sentences matter. So do girls.
Sometimes you’re doing your day, and then suddenly you’re doing strange math, or strange maths if you happen to be in England, which I do not.
When I saw the news that a judge in the United Kingdom had decided three teenage boys — two of them now fifteen years old and one of them fourteen (they had been 14, 14 and 13 at the time of the assaults) — would not serve time for gang-raping two teenage girls in two separate incidents with 10 counts of rape between them — teenage boys who filmed these assaults, laughed as they did it, and then posted the “content” on social media for their friends to see — it took me two days to land on a single word for what I was feeling at all.
Sometimes my sixteen-year-old self rises to the surface and swallows all the words, because she believes they don’t matter. Then my inner attention goes toward protecting her in ways I couldn’t when we both shared a sixteen-year-old body that was violated by a man who didn’t care about the single word No. He didn’t care about the words Stop or Please. He didn’t care about any of my words or sentences.
I have not said a word to my sixteen-year-old daughter about this case, still; I am hoping she has somehow missed the news. The fury I feel is incalculable.
The judge found the teenage boys guilty as charged, and when their guilty verdicts were announced in court, their families let out audible gasps along with their tears. The boys also broke down and looked to their families for support. The boys wore white button-down shirts and had their hair slicked back as the verdicts were read, and I know this because it is, apparently, newsworthy. I read these details in multiple accounts. It seems to have worked on the judge.
Crisp, white, button-down shirts and slicked back hair? In that case, of course. Just a slap on the wrist for you, boys. Make sure you understand consent moving forward. Let’s get you fixed up and back out there. “No one needs to go to jail today.”
Here’s a question or five: If their parents gasped, is it because they were expecting a Not Guilty verdict? Is it possible all the families of all three boys have convinced themselves what their sons did is not rape? Or have they decided rape is not that bad? Or is it that rape is terrible, but not when my son does it? Or is it, Rape is terrible, of course, but my son was only fourteen so he shouldn’t be held responsible, Your Honor. Let’s not ruin his life over it, he’s just a kid, he didn’t mean it, his friends egged him on, he has so much potential, surely you can see that?
The teenage girls were fifteen and fourteen at the time of their separate assaults. The girls did not know each other. The first girl met one of the boys on Snapchat and believed they were in a relationship when he asked her to be his girlfriend. When she traveled to meet him, she thought they were going on their first date. When his two friends suddenly appeared, she was scared. It was clear this was the plan. It was “three boys against one girl” in an underpass, and they threatened to throw her in the river if she didn’t comply. They took turns for an hour-and-a-half. They filmed it.
After they asked “why she looked so sad.” They bought her a drink, left her at a bus stop, and blocked her on social media. When they shared the video online, she got messages from other kids calling her all the names you’d expect.
The second girl was attacked two months later in a field not far from the same underpass. The boys managed to separate her from her friends. They cut her pants off of her. They raped her at knifepoint. She was fourteen. They took turns there as well. There is a video of her lying motionless in the field with her face “buried in her hands.” The boys laughed. They encouraged each other.
The thought of her in that field, holding her face in her hands makes me cry. The parents of those boys should be crying because their boys have no compassion.
The videotapes were played at the 5-week trial. There was a screen between the girls and the rapists. The boys said the girls were lying. They said the first girl was flirting with one of the boys. They said many things that made it necessary for those tapes to be played and for those girls to relive the worst moments of their young lives in front of a room full of strangers in an effort to get some kind of justice. The court agreed the girls were physically overpowered and could not have consented to the attacks.
The first survivor read a poem at the trial that included the line, “All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that time comes.” She said she feels uncomfortable in her own body, suffers from flashbacks and nightmares and is no longer the person she was before.
In his sentencing, Judge Nicholas Rowland mentioned one of the teenagers had ADHD and longstanding anxiety, another had ADHD and a very low IQ, and the third had a mild cognitive impairment.
I have ADHD and I’m in perimenopause. Got my patch slapped on, I’m taking progesterone at night. That should do it, right? Plus grief and anxiety from waking up in a country where we now hold cage fights on the South Lawn. If this is all we need to get away with despicable crimes in the judge’s eyes, I’d love to meet him. I have a list of men I’d like to meet, actually.
He added that, “peer pressure played a large part in what went on.”
I see. He felt it would be better to rehabilitate them and reintegrate them into society than have them enter the justice system. He praised them for doing a good job in court and following the rules. You read the part where I said they called the girls liars, right? That happened during the trial. After everything they’d done, they conducted themselves in court in a way that made it necessary for the girls to re-traumatize themselves if they wanted some justice, and the judge praised their behavior. The girls heard him, of course.
In a statement read on behalf of the second victim, she said her school attendance had suffered and added: “I often feel overwhelmed, anxious and emotionally exhausted to the point where sitting in a classroom becomes unbearable.”
She described suffering nightmares and struggling to sleep, adding: “I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body.”
“The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be.”
The judge praised the bravery of the two girls and told the first victim: “I hope when you look back on today’s date you will take some comfort from the fact you have shown that courage in coming along to court.
“You and [the second girl] have shown great courage in coming along to the trial and speaking as you did.”
He added: “The sentence I am going to pass cannot possibly undo what happened to you.”
It’s true, the sentence he passed, whatever it was, could not have undone anything that happened, but it could make things worse. He had an opportunity to make those boys understand in real, painful, and immediate terms that what they’d done was not acceptable and not a thing anyone can do and expect to carry on with life while they attend classes for a year, or eighteen months, or three years — classes scheduled around school and whatever else brings them joy.
He could have offered a sentence that would have made those girls feel their lives mattered, and were — at the very least — equally valuable to the lives of boys who could behave that way. That he’d seen and heard what happened to them, and was horrified, and that he would not let it stand. That he would make sure those boys paid a price and suffered enough that they would never forget the way they made those girls suffer. Sometimes suffering is a gift. It teaches you empathy, a thing these boys lack in spades. They think all they need to do is dress the part of upstanding young men, and they’ll be off and running, and the judge proved them right.
He could have sent a message to other boys and men: If you rape girls and women, you will pay in a way that will be more than “inconvenient.”
The message he sent instead is, “Girls, I’m sorry this happened, and you were brave to come forward. I am not going to criminalise what happened to you, though, even though rape is against the law. We’re going to let the punishment slide, because these boys are not the kind of boys we want to put away. You understand, don’t you, girls? They have all this promise and potential, and we don’t want it to get squandered in jail. They’d probably be ruined for life that way, and what good will that do? It won’t fix you. Sorry you can’t sleep at night, and have a hard time sitting in a classroom or existing in your own body. That sounds hard. But I’m going to let these boys go home with their blubbering parents today.”
I wish I could say this is some kind of outlier judge who favors boys, or a thing that is unique to the U.K., but this is so common the strange math happens everywhere. I don’t even have to search the internet for another example, I have them at the tip of my brain.
I could whip out names like Brock Turner who was tried here in California for assaulting Chanel Miller (more of that upstanding white boy promise and potential), or Mason Lee Gipson (no jail time for raping a fifteen-year-old and getting her pregnant because he was drunk, you know how it is — just paid the girl $690 and took some parenting classes, because he got paternal rights to the baby she had to carry to term as a result of the rape. There’s no exception for rape in Arkansas.)
Then, of course, there’s “up-and-coming baseball star” Jesse Mack Butler. That’s a case I’m sure you’ve heard of if you pay attention to cases like this, and you probably do if you’re a woman. You definitely do if you’re a survivor of assault.
It’s the kind of thing you keep an eye on, because it gives you a sense of how the justice system is feeling about women and girls, and that’s a thing that will matter to you if you care about women and girls — and also children and any people who aren’t straight, white men — not that you don’t care about them, too, because you do. Just not all of them — not the violent, misogynistic, entitled ones. You’re always hoping things might change, because there is some tiny part of your heart that broke at some point when a thing was taken from you that we could call innocence or trust.
Living with a broken heart is fine. I’d argue it’s part of the human condition. If our hearts weren’t meant to break and open, then carry on, and break and open some more, then carry on, we wouldn’t all be here fighting for the world to be better than this. It’s the hardened hearts that have always scared me, not the broken ones.
But sometimes if you’re in that broken open place and the world breaks your heart again before you’ve had time to recover — especially if you’re just a kid —
for example, if you’re in a place where maybe you can’t stand being in your own body for a while, or you hate falling asleep because you have nightmares about what happened, or you can’t stand to be in a crowd or to be near strangers, and you don’t even feel like yourself anymore —
maybe somewhere in there you manage to protect a tiny pool of hope. Some elemental part of you still alive from the Before Times that you cover over with the rage and shock of every young girl who has ever had her faith in the world stolen from her.
I don’t know how it happens. Maybe there’s a particular vibration, like the sound that only dogs can hear? Maybe there’s a sound that only our grandmothers can hear when some man has decided we’re nothing but a body to overpower. Maybe our grandmas are there on the ceiling with us — because I know I left my body and watched what was happening like it was happening to someone else — and I know if she could have, my Nanny would have come and wrapped herself around me any way she could. Maybe when I returned, I brought something otherworldly and molten along, just enough to gather up a drop of who I was, so it would still exist somewhere. Just in case it was ever safe to come out again.
I can feel it when I get quiet. I can feel it when I meditate. It’s like an iron thorn in my heart. I can live with it and I can love with it, and I surely do, but it’s in there and it hurts, still. Even now, all these years later. I know if only this world would fucking show up for girls and women and children — and every group of people who feel vulnerable because of the angry white men who feel the need to dominate and overpower everything, it might melt and unfurl something tender and sacred. It might release a thirty-nine-year-old howl that would turn the sky scarlet.
Jesse Mack Butler likes to strangle girls until they’re unconscious, and then rape them. He was a high school kid in Oklahoma, a big star on the baseball team. His girlfriend broke up with him after it happened one too many times and she started to be afraid he was going to kill her. She went to the school counselor and school officials to let them know what had been happening.
An ex-girlfriend of his reached out to her when the rumors started swirling. It turned out she’d almost died when he strangled her, too. She’d needed surgery on her neck. But Jesse Mack Butler’s mom was with him all the way, and still is. She just wants him to stay strong and say his prayers. Check out the body-cam video of his arrest. She’s a real #boymom.
No time served for Jesse because he’s got “youthful offender” status. He’s just a good boy who made some baaaaad decisions. I mean, multiple strangulations and rapes are pretty bad, and I don’t think “saying your prayers” is really gonna get you there, but maybe I’m wrong, because he’s home with his mama.
It’s the same in Belgium, in case you wondered. In 2023, a gynecology student named Reuben Vanstiphout, twenty-four at the time, was at a party where he saw a woman who had become extremely drunk. He offered to get her home safely, she could not walk without assistance. She left with him. He was a med student, her friends thought she’d be safe with him. Instead, he took her back to his student accommodations and raped her.
Sounds like the kind of OB/GYN we all want, doesn’t he, ladies? Apparently the judge thought so, because it was Reuben’s first offense, and he had this “promising medical career” ahead of him. So no jail time for Reuben.
The survivor appealed the verdict, but the decision was upheld. Just in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about whose life was valuable in the eyes of the Belgian courts. Disappointing doesn’t cover it.
I don’t know if I can get across how often women and girls see and hear these stories. They’ve been happening for as long as I can remember, and they happen everywhere. It’s the same story every time, assuming the rapist is white. Here in the United States, if the rapist is Black the judge will not show all this incredible compassion if he happens to be fourteen, or if he has ADHD or anxiety. Judges don’t have a hard time criminalizing young Black teenagers or Black men in this country. Matter of fact, unarmed Black boys get killed just for being neurodivergent — they don’t have to commit any crime at all. Unarmed Black people, not just boys.
It’s like we have two different justice systems — one for white boys and men, another for the rest of us. And let’s be very clear, white girls and women fare better than girls and WOC.
I wrote an essay awhile back and it struck a nerve. It has a lot of comments underneath, mostly from women who relate, some from thoughtful men who are horrified, and a few from men who can kiss my ass. The comments still come in every so often because that’s what happens with essays that get a lot of views, you’ll get comments weeks later. I got one the other day from a man who said, “Don’t lump all of us in together. I love women, I have amazing women in my life. I would never be violent toward a woman, men who do that make me sick. Also, one of the details you mentioned in passing is wrong, you should have said it differently. I will stand with you, but I am not part of the problem. Signed, ‘A man who values women.’” I’m paraphrasing in case he comes back for seconds and says I misquoted him — I have no desire to go find the particular comment or call anyone out by name (George Grevend).
I’m kidding, I have no idea what his name is. I was and am too tired to tell him he is part of the problem, though I did point out I never lumped all men together, and I never will. I’m a fan of men, but guess what? NOT ALL MEN. See how that works? There was also a woman who asked me why I met a strange man alone at a bar, and then went on to explain how much smarter she is because she would never do that. I didn’t, lady. Maybe re-read the essay, I am too tired to do whatever it was you wanted to do with your shaming retort. We have to conserve our energy these days. There is much work to be done. We cannot sit around telling every Tom, Dick and Harry, “Not all men!” to soothe their damn egos every time they feel uncomfortable because there is a whole chorus of us howling at the moon together. We are exhausted out here.
I see men on this very platform saying feminism is the problem, and feminists are angry and want to blame men for everything and there’s no evidence of bias against women. There was a male writer who was saying that in the comments of a writer whose work I love. He posted links to his own essays claiming they refuted her assertions, so clicked on a link because I am open-minded, and realized I never need to read another word he has to say. I can’t take anyone seriously if they haven’t bothered to read a little history. Please note that it’s called HIStory.
Women never tried to stop men from having the vote, they never tried to stop men from owning property or having a bank account in their own name or a credit card, either. They never tried to pass laws telling men when they could ejaculate for fun, and/or when they could ejaculate to make a baby, and if they ejaculated for fun but a swimmer got through, that fertilized egg now meant more than any plans they might have had, it didn’t matter if it posed risks to the men’s own lives, it didn’t matter whether they could afford it, and if they tried to not have that baby, we could kill them.
There are no companies paying white women $0.15/hour more than white men just because. Just because they are women. Just because they have a vagina. That’s a weird thing to do, because your vagina doesn’t earn the degree and neither does your penis, your brain does, so you should be paid according to your brain, the end.
If women were making the laws, I can guarantee none of the above things would be happening. People would be paid equally. Then working parents could decide together who would stay home with the baby, if they decided to have a baby, which they would be a lot more likely to do if we had things like affordable healthcare, affordable childcare and paid time off — which we would if women were writing the laws.
Whatever, lame man on the internet, crack a history book or three before you write embarrassing articles that are really about how much you hate women, or just own it. Call your ‘stack I Hate Women SO Much They Really Piss Me Off and at least have some integrity. Believe it or not, we’d respect that more. By the way, feminism is the idea that everyone should have social, economic and political equality, full stop. If you are not a feminist because you need men to be on top, that’s a you problem, and you should probably get some help with it.
I have to talk to all the women right now, and when I say women I mean that inclusively (men feel free to keep reading). I am in California and we are having a messy governor’s race. It’s par for the course in 2026 I guess, but it would have been nice if one thing could have been…not insane. No point lamenting. Things started off with a bang because of a predator, Eric Swalwell. It came to light that he had a Snapchat account for years and was whipping his dick out on the internet and harassing young staffers, but also drugging them and raping them. Allegedly. Putting that there for my legal protection, I believe women.
Before he dropped out he was the frontrunner, the Golden Boy. Crisp, button-down white shirts and all that. Katie Porter was polling at 10%, Swalwell at 14%, Becerra 3-4%. Then Swalwell spontaneously combusted, and Katie Porter should have taken the lead, but a wild thing happened. Becerra suddenly became the “chosen one” and shot up right next to Katie Porter, and then billionaire Tom Steyer was right behind her. I thought, surely, people will rally behind Katie Porter. She has as much experience as Swalwell, she’s smarter than any other candidate (I’ll die on that hill), she’s more progressive, she’s not a billionaire, and she’s great on the environment. Also, she’s the only candidate who has talked about reproductive rights, free childcare, and two free years of community college. Huh.
We keep saying we want women to lead because women are going to care about women’s issues (which are everyone’s issues) as if their lives depend on them, because they do. Men are not going to care in the same way, and they have shown us that for a very, very, very, extremely long time. They have had an open runway and all the green lights and decades and countless chances, so. Yeah. Personally, I’ve seen enough.
Women — we absolutely have to agree that we are going to be ready for the smear campaign when a woman shows up to run. That’s the play.
A competent, smart, ambitious woman runs for office, and all she has to do is step a tiny toe out of her prescribed gender line in any direction, and it’s over. She’s already in a precarious position for having the nerve to step onto a public stage. She’s already letting her intelligence and ambition lead the way. Nonetheless, they will criticize her appearance and a million other details no man has to think about. We are going to have her back, or we aren’t, but they will go in for the kill. They’ll disqualify her because of her emails, or because she laughs too joyously, or because she won’t throw her boss under the bus while he’s still her boss — or if she does, then she’s a terrible person who throws her boss under the bus…see how it goes?
In Katie Porter’s case, it’s her “temperament” (read: she’s a bitch, how original. You realize women in the workforce have been hearing that for as long as women have been in the workforce, right? It’s another way of saying, You should smile more.) She told a staffer to “get the fuck out of her shot.” This was five or six years ago while she was filming something over zoom. The staffer didn’t even blink. She told Katie Porter she had a detail flipped, what she needed to say was X, Y and Z, and then she continued going about her business. Porter apologized to her as soon as the zoom was over. They kept working together for another four years.
Over 30 of Porter’s past and current staffers wrote a heartfelt, passionate letter in support of her, but the narrative stuck. If that’s all it’s going to take, we are never going to have enough women in positions of power to fight for us. Never. Also, it might surprise you to know, some women throw around the f-bomb. I KNOW.
If you followed me around with a camera twelve hours a day for six months, I am very certain there would be something along the way that could be used against me. A moment when my dog barked his head off at the mailman and I told him to please calm the fuck down. He doesn’t mind, I swear. He knows how much I love him. But if you saw a ten-second clip like that and didn’t know me? You might think I was an asshat who didn’t love my dog to the ends of this earth. I dunno.
Maybe you’d take issue with the way I sometimes pretend not to be me when I answer the phone and someone is trying to sell me something. I might “take a message for myself so I can call back later.” I might even forget to give myself the message. If men have this bar that is so low it’s in Hades, and women have a bar that’s so high you can’t even see it, we are screwed.
I have reservations about the top two Dems for different reasons. It sucks to choose between two men I’m not excited about when there’s a woman running circles around them, but we can’t have a MAGA Faux News host running the state, who thinks it’s brilliant to keep calling the fourth-largest economy in the world “Califailure.”
Sir. This is a Wendy’s.
I have been waiting until the last minute to see how things were going to shake out, because if Hilton pulled ahead, I would have voted for one of the Democratic men regardless of my reservations, just to make very, very sure one of them would be in second place. Thankfully, Becerra has a comfortable enough lead for me to feel sure he’ll land in the top 2, so I cast my vote for Katie Porter and I felt fucking good about it.
Meanwhile I am watching all these people wring their hands — many of them (supposedly) progressive, feminist women — because they don’t want to vote for either of the men for various reasons, but have overlooked Katie Porter for weeks and months, like she wasn’t electable. She’s not electable if you won’t elect her, this isn’t complicated. Your internalized misogyny is, though.
This won’t be the last time a wildly competent woman shows up to run for office. She will be attacked. Our job is to be smarter than that. Our job is to say, “I am not basing my opinion of this person on a couple of video clips, I’m basing my opinion on their decades of work and the policies they’ve laid out.” I literally had a woman out here tell me she didn’t like Katie Porter because “she’s not nice and she’s on Ozempic and she lost a lot of weight and now her skin looks saggy in her closeups. We don’t like to admit it, but we care about that in California.” No, honey, you care about it. Also, Katie Porter looks great in her closeups, NOT THAT IT MATTERS.
I filled out my ballot this week and put it in the ballot box yesterday. I spent a few hours last weekend looking up every judge and digging into who they are, because it’s amazing what you can find on the internet these days. The judges matter so much. They decide cases like the ones I’ve been talking about. They can listen to a couple of young girls talk about how their lives have been upended and shattered, and decide that’s sad, but the boys who assaulted them matter more — or they can look at those boys and say: “You’re not going to be wearing those button down shirts for X amount of time. You’re going to whatever the equivalent is of juvenile detention, and you’ll be going to rehabilitation classes every day, there. Christmas will happen there. Spring Break will happen there. Your crying families will visit you there.”
Maybe it’s a year at their age, I don’t know. Maybe new systems need to be developed, new programs, new options for minors who commit heinous, heartless crimes. I know jail isn’t a good place for rehabilitation, but telling boys rape is basically okay isn’t the way forward, either. How do I know? Because we’ve tried it this way for forty, fifty, all the years. It’s not working for anyone.
Girls need to be told their lives are worth something. Their promise and potential matter. They are special and worth protecting. I suspect if we started doing that, there would be hearts broken open all over the entire globe with tiny thorns that suddenly came free, and the hope that would suddenly unfurl would light up the whole entire sky.
It’s true that nothing can undo what has happened in the past, but the past does not have to determine the future unless we let it. Let’s please not let it. Kindness matters. Fighting the good fight is always worthwhile. Words matter.
Good sentences are everything, and not just to writers.
This is such an excellent and horrifying piece. Thank you so much for writing it - for saying all the things the judges and politicians aren't.
I read about this case and was horrified but unsurprised at the sentencing. The patriarchal nightmare we live in is perfectly content to let boys and men destroy our bodies and spirits for sport, and let them off with a wag of the finger and a slap on the wrist.
I think that boys who are capable of such cruelty at a young age are too dangerous to be in society. Period. That judge just let them back into the world without a single thought about what happens now. They got away with it, and they will move through the world as teenage boys who got away with it, which means they will become adult men who know they CAN get away with it.
Those boys aren't done hurting women. Not by a long shot. And they got a permission slip to do so.
Great work, as always.