On another note if you are interested in the topic, I can't recommend Growing Up in Scientology enough on YouTube.
Aaron is an amazing educator, commentator, and satirist on the subject of Scientology. Beyond that he has one of the most genuine, yet charismatic personalities of any person on the platform. I can't say enough good things about him, his journey, and his work with both exposing as well as freeing people from Scientology's grip.
Yeah A A Ron covers Scientology really well, cuts through the nonsence with a great deal of knowledge about the subject and does a lot to help victims of the cult. Well worth a watch.
It's not how you think. For starters not many inmates will risk adding several more years to their sentence for assaulting a sex offender. Most people in prison want to go home. He'll be fine as long as he keeps to himself or stays with other sex offenders. Also, before someone starts their fantasies, prison rape is not common. Prison Rape Elimination Act ended most of that. The type of sex offenders who do get assaulted in prison generally ask for it. Their specific offense plays a factor but its usually because they're annoying as hell, keep pushing boundaries with other inmates, actually it's mostly because they push boundaries.
At best, Masterson would have to "pay rent" if he were in a regular prison, but honestly he'll likely go to a rich white person prison where none of that applies. A prisoner would only get killed if he were a child molester.
Is it just me or does 30 years to life seem longer than you would expect? I'm not trying to argue what he deserves or what the correct amount of time is for rape. I'm just saying that if I had to guess what kind of sentence someone would get for 2 counts of rape, I'd have guessed something like 15 years at most. It seems especially unusual given that he's rich, white, and presumably a first-time offender.
If the sentence is unusually long, would that mean an appeal is more likely to be successful?
After the rapist Brock Turner was given a slap on the wrist, California passed mandatory sentencing for rape.
He was accused of 3 rapes but convicted of 2. He received the maximum sentencing for each.
His lawyers are likely going to fight the conviction constantly until the money runs dry.
My personal thought is the conviction is unlikely to be overturned but a sentence reduction is likely. So he got the maximum sentence. Danny will likely be behind bars for at least 6-10 years for his crimes.
I knew about Brock Turner, but I didn't know California passed new laws as a result. Do you mean mandatory minimum sentences? Or was the maximum raised too? Would 15 years have been illegal for Turner, but is legal for Masterson?
6-10 years for his crimes.
6-10 years is more what I would have expected given his fame and wealth. I wouldn't have been surprised at 15. But, 30 to life seems more like what I'd expect from a second-degree murder sentence for someone with a criminal history, not rape by a rich white Hollywood celebrity.
Sentencing has never made much sense. Depends upon jurisdiction, how many charges prosecutors can tack on, how many you end up going to trial over, how many you get convicted over, and who is responsible for sentencing (in some places the jury sentence, in some the trial judge, in others sentencing is a separate proceeding with a separate judge).
One of the big factors here is that Masterson and his lawyers still deny everything. He didn't cut a deal, hasn't shown remorse since he hasn't admitted to any wrong-doing, and the judge chose to sentence consecutively. First trial was a mistrial, second trial got 2/3 convictions, and apparently they intend to appeal. So depending upon appeal, he is currently facing somewhere between being acquitted on appeal to facing life in prison. In a lot of cases like this, some sort of deal is cut on lesser charges or lesser sentencing in exchange for admitting guilt and not dragging this on through appeal, hence typically shorter sentences. Masterson/his lawyers are instead rolling d20s and the current outcome is a 1.
It varies a hell of a lot by state. Some states will give 40+ years for one rape, some will give under 10 years for multiple rapes. Add in the biases of individual judges, the person being charged, their status, jury biases, etc, and it ends up kinda all over the place.
Be prepared to see how many people rise up to say life minimum when it comes to rape. Of course, I just see that as people admitting the system fails the incarcerated and punishes rather than rehabilitates.
That article talks about the rape, and talks about things that the Scientology cult did on Masterson's behalf. But, I don't see anything in there about other evil shit that he has done / been accused of doing. What sorts of things are you talking about?
Don't you mean that almost all other sentences for rape seem far too short?
There were several aggravating factors here. A long sentence is surprising given that he is a wealthy, white man. But it's absolutely justified (in the current carceral context, of which I strongly disapprove).
Yea, I'm glad he is getting what he deserves but 30 to life seems insane. You can get up to 20 years for murder here (life sentence is possible but only for the rare serial/mass murderer), and getting that 20 years requires you to do some really bad shit. Manslaughter for another example is up to 3 years.
Yeah, seems high. I've known someone that got 10 years for attempted murder (shot someone). I'm not in favor of long sentences like these in general. If a person is not going to rehabilitated in 10 years, then I don't think adding another 20 years is going to help. Same thing if you look at it from a deterrent perspective (if 10 years isn't a deterrent, then any sentence probably wouldn't be). If a person could never be rehabilitated and they would pose a danger to others if released, then a life sentence would probably be the best.
Man, I love That 70s Show, but so much fuckery and creepy shit happened during production. The irony being that this guy could have had any woman he wanted without assaulting them. He was the "cool funny" one on the show. Fucking gross piece of shit.
Idk about any woman he wanted. There are plenty of people who were never attracted to him, and he may be dysfunctional in a way that draws him to those people.
No one can ever have anyone they want. There will always be someone that says no, and if you don’t have the maturity to accept that and let go of your sense of entitlement you might wind up turning into a predator like Masterson.
Rape is about power. Rapists aren’t interested in anyone who wants to give it to them consensually. They want to feel that they are really hurting someone, really destroying their humanity. If it doesn’t demean and permanently fuck up their victim then they want no part in it.
I think there's also a category of rapists who just flat out don't see their victims as people so they try to take whatever they want if they can get away with it.
It's still about power since they can only do that to people without power (temporarily due to impairment or permanently due to society).
But it's not the rapist getting off on having power, it's the rapist doing whatever they want because someone else has no power to stop them and the rapist has no empathy.
Just for curiosity's sake, what did he do to deserve 25 1/2 years before he can be eligible for parole that convicted rapist Brock Allen Turner didn't do when he raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster? They were both convicted in California. Why did Turner, who has been going by Allen Turner and was last seen in the Dayton, OH area, do differently such that his custodial sentence was for 6 months, roughly 2% of the custodial time that Masterson will serve?
Let me be clear that my issue here isn't that Masterson was penalized too much. He took two women's lives and he should spend the rest of his in prison for it. It's just that I see two rapists, one was righteously destroyed by the justice system and the other whose court proceedings essentially made it seem like no one wanted to punish him at all but they very reluctantly felt like they had to.
If we look at it from a pragmatic point of view, the answer is time I believe, the Brock turner case was quite a few years ago, when the laws and public opinion were still in quite a mysogynistic place, the Danny Masterson case was settled today and I believe opened after the metoo movements, where public opinion was shifting more favourably towards the victims. Its wild to see this amount of progress this quickly but I think were starting to see a change for the better overall, same as to how we saw better changes to views of homophobia in the early 2000's from the 90's, where it was "fashionable" to call everything gay in a derogatory way. Also if I recall, brocks dad was involved heavily in the trial if that counts for anything
I think it was the fear that got put into other judges by the recall of the judge that oversaw the Turner debacle. He was removed from the bench by outraged voters, as is right and good.
I have no idea about this case, but there's a big difference between restorative (which is tentatively being trialed in many places) and a more traditional retributive justice system.
The first seeks the victims input and attempts to compensate the community effected. Retributive justice uses a more nebusous sense of what's right/deserved and what's wrong/unjust.
Pros and cons to both approaches. It's still debatable which one is better at rehabilitation. But our current system doesn't seem to place a high priority on that anyways.
This isn't a case where a different theory of justice was being experimented with. In this case, the rich white man going to the prestigious, expensive ivy league school was given 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster because, among other reasons, a stiffer sentence would have negatively impacted his career as a competitive swimmer. The judge who sentenced Turner to only 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster had also presided over a case where an underage girl was gang-raped, also while unconscious. He allowed to be entered into evidence photos of her at a party a year after she was raped as evidence that she did not suffer from PTSD after being gang raped by a baseball team. It's hard to imagine anything other than that this judge was a proponent of rape and did his best to protect rapists from any sort of punishment at all, but when absolutely forced to render some sort of sentence he punished rapists as little as possible.
Has Ashton said anything new yet? The guy built a reputation for defending victims of abuse, but when they're his buddy Danny's victims he suddenly has no comment and continued to hang out with him until he was jailed.
Every person that was arrested with the help of Ashton Kutcher was automatically called guilty by him without trial, but when his friend rapes people he's all "I just can't know".
I lost all my respect for him for refusing to ditch an obvious rapist
I mean, does it really matter? I don’t follow the situation, but his lack of opinion on this matter can be a blight on his reputation but it doesn’t change what he did for other victims.
Besides, who cares about a celebrity’s opinion anyway?
I don't care about celebrities' opinions. But in this day and age, those fuckers are listened to by impressionable people who have 24/7 access to their voices.
Because of his work with Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children. This doesn't just hurt his reputation, but very specifically because of the nature of the foundation, could hurt it too. Hopefully it doesn't, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't something
I mean it sucks that it’s a missed money opportunity, (who wouldn’t love to coast on prior work they’ve done?) but a lot of the actors and actresses turned out just fine monetarily speaking idk. They’ll be alright.
I really only feel sorry for the people he raped and the people who have to handle these types of cases day in and day out.
What's the difference between this and what Trump did? I'm curious why this one gets prison time, but Trump didn't. If it was two decades ago when this happened, I would habe thought it was past the statue of limitations.
Criminal vs civil trial due to the statute of limitations. Trump could not be criminally charged as the crime happened too long ago. The law limiting the time was changed in 2006 but that can't be retroactively applied.
The problem is that many alleged victims of sexual assault, like Carroll, cannot avail themselves of the criminal justice system. At the time when Carroll alleges Trump raped her, the statute of limitations for rape in the state of New York was five years. In 2006, New York changed the law and abolished the statute of limitations for certain types of assault, but that change does not apply retroactively to crimes committed before 2006.
I don't understand the retroactive part. The rapes supposedly happened in 2003 in this case, which would apply the same way according to this statement. But it doesn't seem to be applied that way here.
I re-watched Beethoven's 2nd a few weeks ago and everything made sense now.
Charles Grodin was always suspicious of Danny Masterson's character right from the start, up until the very end. Danny also has a weird reaction when Ryce says she was looking for Taylor, knowing his opportunity to introduce her to Scientology was blown.
I never followed this case. So he raped 2 women? Or at least that's what the sentence is for. A sentence as excessive as that does not seem wise to me. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any sympathy for rapists. I do have sympathy for the victims.
But what does this sentence really send as a message to criminals? From a criminal's point of view you can just as well kill all witnesses, especially the victims, if it won't make the consequences of being caught any worse but reduced the chances of being caught. This is really, really unwise.
I think in this case specifically, it was due to the threats and shit that were being thrown towards the judge and jury by the church of Scientology. The sentence is to send a full message to the church that no, you fucks cannot get away with these things anymore.
I'm glad he's been put away, not just for the rapes, but the murder of Cedric Bixler-Zavala's dog (from ATDI/Mars Volta. Masterson raped his wife, and two of Cedric's dogs were poisoned after she came forward).
If he had been convicted of raping and murdering 2 women he'd likely be looking at life without parole or death. It would absolutely have made the consequences worse.
Yeah let’s make sure we don’t send the wrong message to psychopaths by sending them to jail for fear they will escalate their wrongdoings. Maybe we could just ask them pretty please to stop raping people. Or maybe just not worry about rape at all. /s
Let me understand. You are an american soldier, torture and kill war prisoners, 6 months and disonorably discharge. You kill 200.000 people and you are a war hero ( Oppenheimer ). You rape two american women, 30 years? And the world should follow american ethics?
Reality is that westerners are huge hypocrites, they see the rest of the world as less human, and below their own race. so such triple standards aren't surprising.
Imagine reading about the decades of wounds these poor women suffered, only for the associated press to ask you to pay them to read more about their pain.