WILLIAMSBURG — Northside Festival booted a band off the lineup after one of its members, a high school friend of Brock Turner who was convicted in the Stanford rape case, wrote a letter to the judge defending her former classmate.
Leslie Rasmussen, who plays drums and sings with her two sisters in the band Good English, grew up with Turner in Ohio. She told the judge that her high school friend, who was sentenced to six months in county jail for felony sex assault, was different from a run of the mill rapist, Think Progress first reported.
#brockturner court probation report is fetid pond of victim-blaming rapeyness @thehuntinground @hodgman @brielarson pic.twitter.com/hygboyoV9q
— Michele Dauber (@mldauber) June 6, 2016
It's “completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot,” Rasmussen wrote. "That is a rapist. These are not rapists. I know for a fact that Brock is not one of these people.”
She followed up by saying that people should, "stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day."
Turner was convicted in March of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.
Blgger ONTD connected Rasmussen to her band Good English, scheduled to play Northside Festival at Bar Matchless this week as part of the massive, North Brooklyn music festival. Social media users began clogging up the festival's page, decrying the band.
Hey @BarMatchless reconsider Good English. Don't give rape apologists a platform. #BrockTurner
— KunkleBunkle (@kunklebunkle) June 7, 2016
By Tuesday afternoon, the festival organizers decided to drop Good English from the bill, announcing the decision on Facebook and Twitter.
Northside Festival didn't immediately return a request for further comment.
Good English's publicist at Behind the Curtains Media didn't respond immediately to a request for comment. The band's Facebook and Twitter accounts have since been deleted.
Last Thursday, Brock Turner was sentenced to six-month's jail time for the felony sex abuse charges when a judge decided that a longer sentence would have a "severe impact" on him.
The light sentence swept national headlines last week and BuzzFeed then published the victim's devastating written response to the judge's decision in a post that went viral over the weekend.
It's been a rough couple of weeks for Northside Festival, who last week announced it would move all of its shows from a venue accused of hosting a Neo-Nazi music festival.
