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A 23-year-old rape victim's emotional letter to her attacker, former Stanford swimmer Brock Allen Turner, has gone viral. A letter from Turner's father is also garnering attention on social media. VPC
Melanie Hexen's altar.(Photo: Melanie Hexen.)
DES MOINES, Iowa — An Iowa witch and her local coven
are gaining internet fame for “hexing” Brock Turner, the Stanford University swimmer who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman and whose six-month prison sentence has been met with uproar.
The group hexed Turner that he may be impotent, know the pain of pine needles, have nightmares and that food may bring him no sustenance, said Melanie Elizabeth Hexen, one of the coven’s witches. Hexen lives near Wilton and is a "traditional hereditary witch," meaning that, going back generations, the women in her family have been witches.
The coven planned the hexing for just their 13 members, but a Facebook posting for the event caught fire online.
“We use Facebook events as a calendar basically,” Hexen said. “We put it up there so we all knew the date and the time and so people in the coven who can't join in person, could join online.”
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But within hours of posting, the event went viral with thousands of people joining and posting pictures of their own altars.
The subject matter of the event is what seems to be striking a chord, Hexen said.
“I didn’t realize how much everyone needed something like this,” she said. “Women needed a place to go and express the injustice they were feeling. It turned into a sharing circle where people were talking about their own rapes and the injustices they had experienced with those. And there was lots of healing, too, lots of positivity for the victim.”
Hexing isn’t a common occurrence in witchcraft, Hexen said. She’s only done three hexes in her 30 years of being a witch.
But “witches come together when the powers that be aren’t doing their work, which, obviously, the powers that be weren't doing their job in this case.”
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