The 20-year-old University of Portland student was in a bad situation.

She had been drinking. She left a party near campus alone. Her cellphone battery was dead. She was lost, walking barefoot and without a jacket at 3 a.m. on a frigid winter night last year.

Then she spotted a Broadway Cab, flagged it down and got in. She was overcome with relief. She figured she'd soon be safe at home in bed.

But what happened next highlights what have become familiar elements in many sexual assault cases: A vulnerable college-age woman. Alcohol. A man claiming the sexual contact was consensual. A family that can't fathom how accusations against their loved one could be true.

The case also draws parallels to an attack that has triggered national outrage over the last week: A star Stanford University swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a trash bin after she attended a fraternity party.

For the Portland student, it should have been a 5-minute taxi ride to her home. But 71-year-old driver Hossein Tajipour instead drove her through a deserted North Portland industrial district near Kelley Point Park.

He pulled over and grabbed her breasts, stuck his hand down her pants and forced her to perform oral sex, telling her: "This is what it takes to get home."

After two weeks of trial in Multnomah County Circuit Court in January, a jury found Tajipour guilty of first-degree sodomy, three counts of first-degree sexual abuse and coercion. Last month, Circuit Judge Michael Greenlick sentenced Tajipour to 10 1/3 years in prison.

Greenlick shot down Tajipour's request to sentence him to just 2 1/2 years in prison.

Tajipour's much longer sentence is in stark contrast to the controversial decision by a California judge who handed a six-month jail sentence to 20-year-old Stanford swimmer Brock Turner for attacking the 23-year-old victim. The case spurred swift backlash after Turner's father complained to the judge that his son was paying "a steep price" for "20 minutes of action."

As of Thursday, nearly 1 million people had signed a Change.org petition calling for the California judge's removal from the bench.

Society is becoming more attuned to issues prominent in cases like these, victims' advocates say.

What's happening now that didn't in the past is a prolonged conversation about college sexual assaults and vulnerable victims, said Meg Garvin, executive director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute at Lewis & Clark Law School.

"It's not one incident and the conversation stops," Garvin said. "We have a massive grassroots community of campus survivors who aren't letting the conversation stop. ...They're saying here's what happened to me and I'm not going away."

***

Portland police learned of the UP student's sexual assault almost immediately after it happened on Feb. 15, 2015.

Tajipour drove her home and she ran from his cab to the home of neighbors, according to testimony at trial. One of them called 911.

A GPS system in the cab confirmed Tajipour's detour into the industrial area. A city-mandated surveillance camera in the taxi shot more than 1,000 still photos of the cab ride. There was no denying the encounter took place.

Tajipour claimed the woman sat in the front seat of his taxi and came on to him.

Jurors weren't told that two other women had complained to Portland and Beaverton police about Tajipour before.

In a court memo to the judge, prosecutor Jeff Auxier wrote that a woman who had been drinking at a Burnside bar and gotten into Tajipour's cab to go home ended up jumping out of the moving cab to get away from him in 1997. The woman told police that Tajipour asked her to have a drink with him, wouldn't stop the cab when asked and grabbed her thigh, Auxier wrote. Tajipour told police the woman jumped out because she didn't have any money -- and the case wasn't prosecuted when the woman decided not to pursue criminal charges, Auxier wrote.

In 2010, another woman told police that Tajipour drove her to her Beaverton apartment, then followed her to her door and rubbed his fingers through her hair and rubbed his cheek against hers, Auxier wrote in his court memo. The woman told police that Tajipour "made a grab" for her keys, but she was able to hold onto them and get inside her apartment and close the door, the prosecutor wrote. The woman ultimately decided not to pursue criminal charges.

Although the judge didn't allow Auxier to present the complaints as evidence to the jury, Auxier did reference them while arguing for a longer prison sentence at Tajipour's sentencing hearing.

***

Auxier sought a 12 1/2 year sentence for Tajipour.

He wrote in a memo to the judge that Tajipour hasn't taken responsibility for his crimes and continues to be a danger to "the female half of the population."

"In defendant's (pre-sentencing interview), conducted with counsel present, he explained that his crimes "might have been an accident" and "it was bad luck this happened," Auxier wrote.

But Tajipour's defense attorney, Rich Cohen, asked the judge to reject the 8 1/3 year minimum called for under Oregon's Measure 11 law and sentence Tajipour to 2 1/2 years because he had no criminal history and had given countless rides to women passengers with no charges until now.

"My client has been a cab driver well over 20 years," Cohen told the judge. "... You can imagine how many women he's picked up who were intoxicated."

This week, Cohen filed a motion for a new trial based on allegations of age discrimination, national-origin discrimination against his client - as well as claims that a Farsi interpreter did a poor job of translating during Tajipour's testimony. The Iranian-born Tajipour has lived and worked in the U.S. for 23 years.

Tajipour's 33-year-old daughter, Nejla Tajipour, spoke at her father's sentencing, at times struggling to fight back tears.

"My father has never intended to harm anyone," she said.

She questioned the veracity of the woman's story. As part of her many hours of investigation to help her father, she told the judge that she had collected an album of photos of the victim having fun.

"Of her going to Vegas, of her going to the beach during the summertime, of her doing all sorts of activities that sure wouldn't be (done by) someone who was the victim, in my opinion," Nejla Tajipour told Greenlick.

***

The judge said that after reading dozens of pages of letters from Tajipour's relatives, he could tell that the cab driver's family admired him. Tajipour's sister-in-law had argued that her brother succumbed to a short period of weakness, he noted.

The family couldn't see the truth, Greenlick said. "Many folks who commit sex crimes are folks who have lived exemplary lives ... who have ... a dark side, perhaps," he said.

It often comes as a shock to their loved ones, he said.

"I hate to say that this is a common experience, "Greenlick said, "but it's not an uncommon one where family members refuse to accept the reality that their family member is in."

The judge said he was "very convinced" Tajipour had deeply traumatized the woman.

"It is almost impossible to have another conclusion after listening to her testify and listening to her neighbors and friends testify to her reactions to having been sodomized," Greenlick said, "and how she wasn't able to stop shaking in terror and fear, I think, for close to a half hour or an hour after the event occurred."

He didn't agree with the analysis of Tajipour's daughter about the woman's behavior.

"The fact that she may have traveled in the last year or two? Good for her," the judge said. "Victims should not be judged by whether or not they act as others think they should have acted after they've been victimized. The last thing I'd hoped for her is for her to be huddled, paralyzed in her apartment somewhere, afraid to go out."

Then the judge directed his comments toward Tajipour as he explained why he was giving him more than a decade in prison.

"You victimized a very vulnerable person who was over 50 years younger than you," Greenlick said. "Someone came into your car that you should have protected. ...(She) trusted you to safely deliver (her) home. You violated that trust in a fundamental and significant way."

The student had testified during the trial over two days but wasn't in the courtroom to hear those words.

The prosecutor explained why: She's in the process of healing, he said.

"She's choosing to live her life, and not think about this anymore," Auxier said. "What she went through, is something no one should have to go through."

This post has been modified to reflect the following correction:

In an article published June 9, 2016, relating to the sentencing of Hossein Tajipour after his conviction on sex abuse charges, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that Tajipour's sister had submitted a letter to the court in support of Tajipour. In fact, the letter was submitted by Tajipour's sister-in-law, not by his sister. The Oregonian/OregonLive regrets the publication of the inaccuracy.

-- Aimee Green

503-294-5119