Vox Sentences: The biggest lessons from the Stanford sexual assault case

What Hillary Clinton's nomination means for women (and which ones); moving beyond internet outrage in the case against Brock Turner.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Hillstory

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

• Last night, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to (presumptively) secure a major party's nomination for president, in what I (Dara) insist on thinking of as herstory in the making.

  [Hillary Clinton via Time]

• (As with any accomplishment, Clinton is standing on the shoulders of her foremothers here — most notably Shirley Chisholm, who ran in 1972 and who is a significant reason for the Democratic Party's self-conception as a champion of women's rights today.)

  [The Nation / John Nichols]

• When it comes to women's representation, the US is somewhat behind the curve. As of last summer, about 45 percent of world countries had been run by women in the past 50 years.

  [Pew Research Center / Lauren Kent]

• Having women in elected office matters. Vox's Matt Yglesias lays out the research showing that it helps increase women's political participation at all levels.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Right now, after an often toxic primary season, getting more involved might not seem that appealing. Women who've supported Clinton have often felt the need to sequester themselves in private online groups to avoid abuse...

  [Be Yourself / Virginia Heffernan]

• ...while women who haven't supported Clinton (some of whom described their position on Twitter as #GirlIGuessImWithHer) bristle at the idea Catherine Liu critiqued in February: that they're supposed to support a women in the name of feminism even if they feel she's bad for women.

  [BuzzFeed / Catherine Liu]

• And then there are the women who simply don't have feels. Maybe some of them will develop feels in time — you should read Vox's Sarah Kliff's personal essay, on why she appreciates Clinton's accomplishment now so much more than she did in 2008.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

Here comes the general

Getty Images

• And so — having reached the stage in Bernie Sanders's campaign in which the staffers dish on each other to the press to make sure they don't get blamed for failure, which usually means the end is near — we move on to a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump general election.

  [Politico / Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti]

• Clinton's fundamentals are strong. Matt Yglesias argues that the campaign assets that helped her beat Bernie Sanders are going to be even more effective against Donald Trump.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Her biggest asset is simply that she's a Democrat running in a presidential election year, in a country where there simply aren't enough white voters (much less white male voters) to elect a president anymore.

  [Washington Post / Stu Rothenberg]

• Of course, that only applies if Democrats can stop congratulating themselves for running against Trump and start actually working to turn out nonwhite voters, which is an area where they still have a lot of work to do.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• And the fact that Clinton's favorability ratings have fallen precipitously over the past two months, to the point where they're almost as bad as Trump's, can't be comforting to her campaign.

  [NYT / Karen Yourish]

• All of this is part of the calculus going into choosing a running mate. If you're a systematic thinker, you should check out Alvin Chang's VP shortlist generator, built from a yuge database of politicians.

  [Vox / Alvin Chang]

• If you're Donald Trump, you are not a systematic thinker, and your advisers are apparently afraid that you might just up and announce your running mate on Twitter.

  [Bloomberg / Michael C. Bender and Jennifer Jacobs]

There are heroes in this story

Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, via Diana Prichard

• You may have heard over the past few days about the case of former Stanford student Brock Turner, who was sentenced to six months in jail last week on three felony counts for sexually assaulting a woman while she was unconscious.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• The case became a national story because of the statement the victim read at Turner's sentencing, which BuzzFeed republished in full. It is a tremendous piece of writing, one of the more compelling personal essays about trauma that I (Dara) have ever read.

  [BuzzFeed News / Katie J. M. Baker]

• The judge, however, didn't side with the victim, and instead acceded to the wishes of Turner and his family and friends — all of whom appear to believe for all the world that people don't usually get punished for what Turner did, and that the fault belongs to the people who allowed college students to drink alcohol (something college students often do without assaulting anyone).

  [The Guardian / Sam Levin]

• That's led to a campaign to recall the judge, who is elected but was running unopposed in yesterday's California primary. (N.B. electing judges is a bad policy, period.)

  [NYT / Tracey L. Meares]

• The big reveal here is that the judge was a Stanford alum and, like Turner, a school athlete. That means the judge was able to see himself in Turner — something that defense lawyers, like Ken White (writing at the excellent site Mimesis Law), wish they did with less privileged clients too.

  [Mimesis Law / Ken White]

• There are heroes in this story. One is the victim; the others are the two Swedish men who intervened when they saw Turner assaulting the victim, and chased him off, proving that "bystander intervention" might not be a terrible way to address rape after all.

  [Huffington Post / Tyler Kingkade]

MISCELLANEOUS

Why aren't millennials going to the movies? [The Atlantic / Derek Thompson]

• A former CIA officer is set to be extradited to Italy to serve prison time for an "extraordinary rendition" she helped carry on in 2003, kidnapping a cleric in Milan and sending him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. She'd be the first person in the extraordinary rendition program to go to prison.

  [The Guardian / Stephanie Kirchgaessner]

• A group in San Francisco is hoping to solve the city's housing crisis with one big law. Here's what it would do.

  [Medium / Greg Ferenstein]

• Two pollsters argue the idea of a "Trump bump" in recent weeks is nonsense: Democrats have always led the presidential race, and their lead is growing.

  [Washington Post / Tobias Konitzer and David Rothschild]

• Meet Aloha Wanderwell: the amazingly named, pet monkey–owning first woman to drive around the world.

  [Atlas Obscura / Lauren Young]

VERBATIM

"At the meeting, I literally said that if we go forward with this, somebody will be killed." [Mark Lillie to Bloomberg Businessweek / Susan Berfield, Craig Trudell, Margaret Cronin Fisk, and Jeff Plungis]

• "Yale helped me buy my house, and now they’re investing in the company that’s trying to take my house from me. I just don't get it."

  [Bloomberg / Janet Lorin]

• "San Jose has taken the rare step of publicly opposing the project, saying it would add far too many jobs."

  [WSJ / Eliot Brown via Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• "Alexandra Holzer, a ghost researcher and Huffington Post blogger, says there have been reports of people having ghost sex, but says it feels heavy but not so hot."

  [Huffington Post / David Moye]

• "With my son, Nathan, getting old enough to brush his own teeth, I thought I’d mix a little fun into parenting and draw up some colorful cartoon characters to help teach him proper oral hygiene. Please believe me when I say that had I known they would come to life and show up at our home, I would not have created them."

  [ClickHole]

WATCH THIS

The big fight over Coexist [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

Piotr Mlodozeniec

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via