Page 86 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

CHAPTER EIGHT

Case Study:
The Fraternity Party

1.

Prosecution: And at some point on your way over to Kappa Alpha house, did you observe
anything unusual?
Jonsson: Yes.
P: What did you see?
Jonsson: We observed a man on top of a—or a person on top of another person, I should say.
P: And where was that?

Jonsson: Very close to the Kappa Alpha house.
Palo Alto, California. January 18, 2015. Sometime around midnight. Two Swedish graduate
students are cycling across the campus of Stanford University on their way to a fraternity party.
They see what looks like two people, lying on the ground, just outside a fraternity house where a
party is full swing. They slow down so as not to disturb the couple. “We thought that it was their
personal moment,” one of the students, Peter Jonsson, would say when he testified in court. As they
drew closer, they saw that the man was on top. And beneath the man was a young woman.
P: What about the person on top? Did you see any movement or motion from that person?
Jonsson: Yeah. So first, he was only moving a little bit. And then he started thrusting more
intensely.…
P: And what could you see the person on the bottom doing?
Jonsson: Nothing.
Jonsson and his friend, Carl-Fredrik Arndt, got off their bikes and walked closer. Jonsson called
out, “Hey, is everything all right?” The man, on top, lifted his body and looked up. Jonsson came
closer. The man stood up and began backing away.
Jonsson said, “Hey. What the fuck are you doing? She’s unconscious.” Jonsson said it a second
time. “Hey. What the fuck are you doing?” The man began to run. Jonsson and his friend gave chase
and tackled him.

The person Jonsson tackled was Brock Turner. He was nineteen, a freshman at Stanford and a
member of the university’s swim team. Less than an hour earlier, he had met a young woman at the
Kappa Alpha party. Turner would later tell police that they had danced together, talked, gone
outside, and lain down on the ground. The woman was a recent college graduate, known thereafter,
under the protections of sexual-assault law, as Emily Doe. She had come to the party with a group
of friends. Now she lay motionless under a pine tree, next to a dumpster. Her skirt was hiked up
around her waist. Her underwear was on the ground next to her. The top of her dress was partially
pulled down, revealing one of her breasts. When she came to in the hospital a few hours later that
morning, a police officer told her she may have been sexually assaulted. She was confused. She got
up, went to the bathroom, and found that her underwear was gone. It had been taken for evidence.