Was Stanford swimmer too rich and white to go to prison for rape?

The internet erupted with outrage after a California judge gave All-American Stanford swimmer Brock Turner an unusually light sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at a frat party.

Turner faced up to 14 years in prison, but the judge instead gave him just six months in jail, three years probation, and sex offender registration. The judge said a stricter sentence would have “a severe impact” on Turner.

Thursday’s sentence drew fury from prosecutors, anti-rape organizations, academics, and the general public. Outrage spread across social media as critics used the hashtag #brockturner to blast the justice system and a culture of victim-blaming.

The woman, who has not been publicly identified, read in court a harrowing letter to her attacker. It went viral.

“You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today,” she said.

She described waking up in a hospital and learning the details of her own attack through a news article. Her letter, published on BuzzFeed News, generated more than 8 million views.

Turner’s father, Dan Turner, called the six-month sentence unfair, saying his son “has never been violent to anyone, including his actions on the night of Jan, 17, 2015.” He called the sentence “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.”

Critics called Dan Turner’s statements “tone-deaf” and “impossibly offensive.”

“You love your son and you should,” Christian writer John Pavlovitz wrote in response to Dan Turner’s statements. “But love him enough to teach him to own the terrible decisions he’s made, to pay the debt to society as prescribed, and then to find a redemptive path to walk, doing the great work in the world that you say he will.”

One of Turner’s childhood friends, Leslie Rasmussen, also wrote a letter to the judge, saying the case was biased against him. Rasmussen said it was wrong to base Turner’s fate on the words of a girl who could not remember what happened.

Some said the judge was lenient because the defendant was the face of privilege and an all-star athlete at a prestigious university.

“We want our criminal justice to work and when you have someone who’s being pitied because they’re young, attractive, and white, what does that say about our criminal justice system?” said Andrea Pino, author of We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out! “It paints a bigger picture of how much has to change to really take sexual assault seriously in this country.”

But this case differed from many campus assault cases because a jury convicted Turner in a criminal trial, rather than a campus hearing with rules favoring the victim over the accused. Two eye-witnesses, a rarity in such cases, also testified to finding Turner atop the victim. The jury came to a unanimous verdict.

Though some people tried to excuse Turner because the victim had blood alcohol levels three times the legal driving limit, people on social media weren’t buying it.

“When a man rapes a woman he’s excused b/c of alcohol. When a woman is raped, it’s her fault for getting drunk. Unacceptable,” tweeted Nate Poekert.

“Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened,” the victim said in court, referring to the party. “But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else.”