Have you ever wondered how magicians like Harry Houdini and Dorothy Dietrich pulled off their famous escape stunts? They must have had a spare key hidden up their sleeve, or an assistant helping them out behind the scenes, right?
Well, a Stanford student named Brock Turner just pulled a stunt that’ll totally blow your mind: he escaped from a prison cell using nothing but white male privilege.
Abracadabra!
Want to know how he did it? First, Brock was locked in a cell in the Santa Clara County jail. There were a number of safeguards in place to keep him from getting out: reinforced doors, constant supervision by armed officers, the American legal system, the basic concept of justice itself, and fundamental rights and human empathy for survivors of sexual assault. And Brock managed to slip past all of that. Mind = blown!
And here’s the craziest part: the entire trick only took him three months. To put that into context, that’s about seven weeks shorter than Houdini’s famous run at the New York Hippodrome, and about six years shorter than the recommended jail sentence for a straight-up rapist who violently assaulted an unconscious person knowing that they were incapable of giving any type of consent whatsoever. Wow!
So what’s next for Brock Turner? Well, nothing more than a slap on the wrist, that’s for sure! But in the meantime, this impossible stunt is definitely making us believe in magic – and making it hard to believe in anything else anymore.