(Chris Parker, Headline USA) In 2020, a 15-year-old-girl named Pieper Lewis was kidnapped and raped in Iowa by Zachary Brook, a 37-year-old human trafficker. She stabbed him and escaped in June of that year.
Now, at the age of 17 (still a minor), she is being ordered to pay Brooks’ family $150,000 in restitutions, reported Fox News.
Additionally, she has been ordered to serve five years of probation and 200 hours of community service. Polk County District Judge David Porter ordered the sentence while deferring the 10-year prison sentence she originally faced.
Porter believes he did the minor a service, stating a GPS tracking device will ensure she won’t fall “back into the lifestyle that you thus far left” after claiming that he was “presented with no other option.”
“My spirit has been burned, but still glows through the flames,” she read from a prepared statement. “Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow.”
Prosecutors were bothered by her proclamation that she was a “survivor,” claiming she was responsible for depriving her attacker’s children of their child-molesting father.
“The next five years of your life will be full of rules you disagree with, I’m sure of it,” Porter said, later adding, “This is the second chance that you’ve asked for. You don’t get a third.”
A GoFundMe fundraiser organized by one of her Lewis’s school teachers has already raised more than enough money to cover her restitution amount.
Democrat officials have slowly begun using “criminal reform” policies that do more to punish victims than criminals, typically beginning with law-abiding gun owners. Biden Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson also has a history of being lenient towards child sex offenders. Left-leaning representatives, pundits and journalists have been quick to defend her.
Iowa does not currently have a safe harbor law, so trafficking victims are more likely to be criminalized in that state for defending themselves.
