Actress Patricia Arquette went off on Stanford rapist Brock Turner and the obscene backlog in untested rape kits in states across the country.
On Chelsea Handler's latest episode of her Netflix show "Chelsea," the two discussed Arquette's latest project "Equal Means Equal," about gender equality. Arquette made news last year, when she won an Academy Award and gave an impassioned speech about the pay gap between men and women.
"Right now, we have only 3 percent of rapists even serving one day in jail," Arquette told Handler. "This Brock Turner situation is not an anomaly — it is the norm."
Handler was quick to remark that Turner served just half of his six-month sentence for raping a fellow Stanford student.
"But when you have just 3 percent ever serving a day," Arquette continued. "When you have hundreds of thousands of untested DNA rape kits, with the genetic material of the rapist sitting on shelves, never being processed. And it's not happening in one state. Every single state had rape kit backlogs. They were prosecuting kids spray-painting or selling weed before they were dealing with rapists."
She wondered why women are such a low priority in the eyes of law enforcement and prosecutors. "We need to fundamentally ensure that women have equal rights in the Constitution, and that way we'll have federal standing so we can start to challenge all these biases state-by-state."
Check out the video clip below. The full interview is available on Netflix now.
