CUTTING TIES

Rock Festival Nixes Band Over Connection to Brock Turner

Drummer penned letter in defense of Stanford student.

New York’s Northside Festival, which takes place this upcoming weekend, has canceled an appearance of Ohio-based band Good English because of a member’s ties to convicted Stanford rapist Brock Turner. “Due to recent information brought to our attention, Good English is no longer playing Northside Festival,” the festival's organizers tweeted Tuesday. That information: Leslie Rasmussen, the drummer for the all-female trio, penned a letter defending Turner, 20, the student convicted of raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and who received what many believe to be a light sentence of six months. “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,” wrote Rasmussen, a childhood friend of Turner’s. “I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.”