Welcome to Gender Letter — a weekly take on news, trends and culture by The Times’s gender initiative. Today’s installment is by Zoe Greenberg, whose day job is working with two Op-Ed columnists, Nicholas Kristof and Charles M. Blow. Want future installments delivered to your inbox? Sign up here. Tell us what you think at nytgender@nytimes.com.

Dear readers,

The judge who sentenced Brock Turner, a Stanford University student charged with sexually assaulting a woman while she was unconscious, has been recalled by California voters.

The campaign against the judge, Aaron Persky, was fueled by outrage over what many believed to be a lenient six-month jail term handed down to Mr. Turner. (The maximum sentence was 14 years.)

When I first read about the case, I felt my heart rate spike.

The victim, identified as Emily Doe to protect her privacy, went to a party, blacked out, and woke up, bleeding and covered in pine needles, in the hospital. In a searing statement, she described how she learned only later that she had been found unconscious and “naked all the way down to my boots, legs spread apart, and had been penetrated by a foreign object by someone I did not recognize.”