CNN host Ashleigh Banfield on giving voice to the survivor in the Stanford rape case

"Your Honor, if it is all right, for the majority of this statement I would like to address the defendant directly."

Those are the first words of a courtroom statement that went viral this week, spreading quickly through social media, giving voice to an unnamed victim of sexual violence and sparking outrage and empathy.  The defendant was 20 year old Stanford university student Brock Turner, convicted of three charges of sexual assault.

The author of the statement is the woman he assaulted.  

It's a remarkable document, not just for the emotion it reveals, which is raw, but because it challenges the legal process itself, articulating the frustration of thousands of women who failed to find justice in the courts.

I was told that because I couldn't remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted ... I had to fight for an entire year to make it clear that there was something wrong with this situation.- Anonymous victim in the Stanford University sexual assault case

It's also skillfully written. Physically attacked, and then affronted by the legal process, she recalls events with precision and clarity.

On the matter of her assault she writes:

"I was told that because I couldn't remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, almost broke me. It is the saddest type of confusion to be told I was assaulted and nearly raped, blatantly out in the open, but we don't know if it counts as assault yet. I had to fight for an entire year to make it clear that there was something wrong with this situation."

But there was more to come.

Compounding the victim's outrage is the penalty some say is far too lenient. When Judge Aaron Persky chose to sentence Turner to six months in jail and three years' probation, even the Santa Clara County District Attorney said "The punishment does not fit the crime." An online petition to remove Persky from the bench has over a million signatures.  Some Members of Congress are weighing in.  Vice President Biden reached out to the victim to express support.

Outrage goes viral

The collective outrage over the case would probably never have crystallized if filmmaker Amy Ziering hadn't released the anonymous victim's statement to BuzzFeed the day after the sentencing. The online news and entertainment site posted it on Friday afternoon. Within four days it had 11 million views.

One of those millions of people was Ashleigh Banfield, host of Legal View on CNN. On the June 6th edition of her program she made the unusual decision to read the 7,200 word statement, nearly in its entirety, without interruption.

I was thinking, I hope I do this person justice, because she's been cheated out of it and the bigger a platform I can give her, the more people will take her message and think about what is and isn't consent.- Ashleigh Banfield, host of CNN's Legal View

On CBC Radio's Day 6, she told Brent Bambury the power of the writing convinced her to present the text intact on her show.

"I was reading the statement on Sunday and I realized how long it was but one quarter of the way into it I realized how significantly powerful it was, how articulate. And I knew it should see a bigger platform. I knew people would want to hear this.

"And as long as it was and as unusual a decision it might be to put that on television, in that format, I didn't think it would matter one bit."

Still, it was unusual enough that Banfield cleared it with CNN executives before she took it to air. She recalls:

"I merely reached out to the president of CNN Worldwide Jeff Zucker and asked 'Can we do this?' And he was immediate in his response. He said "I don't care how long it takes. If you want to do that, do it.'"

She opened the broadcast by signalling to viewers that it would be a "special and unusual hour."  And then began the nearly 20 minute reading of the words of the woman Banfield calls a survivor of assault.

"I was thinking, I hope I do this person justice, because she's been cheated out of it and the bigger a platform I can give her, the more people will take her message and think about what is and isn't consent."

An emotional experience

As she presents the statement, Banfield becomes emotional.

She reads these words:

"The night the news came out I sat my parents down and told them that I had been assaulted, to not look at the news because it's upsetting, just know that I'm okay, I'm right here, and I'm okay. But halfway through telling them, my mom had to hold me…"

Here, Banfield pauses for approximately seven seconds. Her voice very briefly wavers, and then she becomes composed and continues.

"…because I could no longer stand up."

Banfield says, "For a moment I realized what [the writer] and her parents were feeling and it was… it was heart-sickening.  And so that's what happened there. I tried my best to keep going, I tried my best to keep it together."

"We can't divorce ourselves from that. We try our best to be unbiased when we cover politics, we try our best to cover a crisis with a calm head, but in the end we all bring our personal sensibilities to what we do and how we tell stories. Otherwise it would be a very mechanical process."

The voice that's missing

The author of the statement addresses media coverage in her text, and is critical especially of the media's obsession with the athleticism of her assailant, a competitive swimmer.

She recalls finding, by accident, an article online about her assault.

"I could not imagine my family having to read about this online. I kept reading. In the next paragraph, I read something that I will never forgive; I read that according to him, I liked it. I liked it. Again, I do not have words for these feelings."

"And then, at the bottom of the article, after I learned about the graphic details of my own sexual assault, the article listed his swimming times."

Banfield admits trials for sexual assault present challenges to media coverage.

"The survivors of these crimes most often want to stay anonymous for understandable reasons.  For us to cover a story without a party that we can ascribe detail, or character, or name to, it becomes difficult. So people will try to cover a story with only one side of the color.  And the other side, that stays mysterious."

Media critics have praised Banfield's coverage of the story, not just for the presentation of the statement but also for continuing analysis of the fallout from the case. But she says one critic in particular matters most.

"I think the best response that I got was from the survivor, she reached out to me and she told me that she watched it.

"She watched me read her words. She's in hiding, she can't join the conversation herself, but she was so buoyed by the fact that every word of hers was being read that she said it warmed her heart and changed everything.  That was the reaction that was most phenomenal.

"It took me by the shoulders and shook me and told me how significant it was that we made the decision to do this."