Donations poured in Thursday on the GoFundMe platform, where a campaign was created to help a young American woman sentenced to pay 150,000 dollars to the relatives of a man she accuses of having raped her on numerous occasions, in the context of forced prostitution, and that she killed.
The case of Pieper Lewis, 17, has moved in the United States, where minors exploited by pimps struggle to assert their victim status in court.
“A raped child should never, under any circumstances, owe money to the family of her rapist,” wrote one of her former teachers, Leland Schipper, who created this crowdfunding campaign.
According to her account, and that on the local media, the young girl had found herself on the streets at the age of 15 and had been taken in by a man who had forced her to have sex with others.
In 2020 in Des Moines, in the northern United States, she had stabbed a thirty-year-old who was paying to rape her, as she related.
Initially charged with murder, the girl pleaded guilty to manslaughter and faced 20 years in prison.
The police and the prosecutor do not dispute the fact that the minor was the victim of sexual exploitation. On Tuesday, a judge decided to give him “a second chance” by ordering a suspended prison sentence.
Concretely, if she respects the conditions of her release for five years, her record will become empty again.
But under a law in force in the state of Iowa which obliges to compensate the relatives of the victims of a homicide, the magistrate ordered her to pay 150,000 dollars to the family of the man whom she killed.
Denouncing a “morally unjustifiable” law, Mr. Schipper then created a GoFundMe campaign.
Donations, often $20 to $50, quickly exceeded the set amount. The amount raised was more than $386,000 on Thursday afternoon.
In a postscript, the teacher specifies that the additional funds will finance the studies of the young girl.