about alcohol. The entire case turned on the degree of Emily Doe’s drunkenness.
In the end, the jury ruled against Turner. His version of events was simply unconvincing. If—as Turner suggests—they had a warm, consensual encounter, why did he run the moment he was challenged by the two grad students? Why was he “dry humping” her after she had passed out? Just after midnight, Doe left a voice mail for her boyfriend. The tape of that conversation was played for the jury. She’s barely coherent. If the legal standard is “so ‘out of it’ that she does not understand what she is doing,” then she sounded pretty close to that.
During the trial’s closing arguments, the prosecutor showed the jury a picture of Doe, taken as she lay on the ground. Her clothes are half off. Her hair is disheveled. She’s lying on a bed of pine needles. A dumpster is in the background. “No self-respecting woman who knows what’s going on wants to get penetrated right there,” the prosecutor said. “This photo alone can tell you that he took advantage of somebody who didn’t know what was going on.” Turner was convicted of three felony counts associated with the illegal use of his finger: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person, and sexual penetration of an unconscious person. He was sentenced to six months in prison and must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
The who of the Brock Turner case was never in doubt. The what was determined by the jury. But that still leaves the why. How did an apparently harmless encounter on a dance floor end in a crime? We know that our mistaken belief that people are transparent leads to all manner of problems between strangers. It leads us to confuse the innocent with the guilty and the guilty with the innocent. Under the best of circumstances, lack of transparency makes the encounter between a man and a woman at a party a problematic event. So what happens when alcohol is added to the mix?
4.
Dwight Heath was a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University in the mid-1950s when he decided to do the fieldwork for his dissertation in Bolivia. He and his wife, Anna Heath, flew to Lima with their baby boy, then waited five hours while mechanics put boosters on the plane’s engines. “These were planes that the U.S. had dumped after World War II,” Heath recalls. “They weren’t supposed to go above 10,000 feet. But La Paz, where we were headed, was at 12,000 feet.” As they flew into the Andes, Anna Heath says, they looked down and saw the remnants of “all the planes where the boosters didn’t work.”
From La Paz they traveled 500 miles into the interior of eastern Bolivia, to a small frontier town called Montero. It was the part of Bolivia where the Amazon Basin meets the Chaco region—vast stretches of jungle and lush prairie. The area was inhabited by the Camba, a mestizo people descended from the indigenous Indian populations and Spanish settlers. The Camba spoke a language that was a mixture of the local Indian languages and seventeenth-century Andalusian Spanish. “It was an empty spot on the map,” Heath says. “There was a railroad coming. There was a highway coming. There was a national government…coming.”
They lived in a tiny house just outside of town. “There was no pavement, no sidewalks,” Anna Heath recalls.
If there was meat in town, they’d throw out the hide in front, so you’d know where it was, and you would bring banana leaves in your hand, so it was your dish. There were adobe houses with stucco and tile roofs, and the town plaza, with three palm trees. You heard the rumble of oxcarts. The padres had a jeep. Some of the women would serve a big pot of rice and some sauce. That was the restaurant. The guy who did the coffee was German. The year we came to Bolivia, a total of eighty-five foreigners came into the country. It wasn’t exactly a hot spot.
In Montero, the Heaths engaged in old-fashioned ethnography—“vacuuming up everything,” Dwight says, “learning everything.” They convinced the Camba that they weren’t missionaries by openly smoking cigarettes. They took thousands of photographs. They walked around the town and talked to whomever they could, then Dwight went home and spent the night typing up his notes. After a year and a half, the Heaths packed up