Yeah Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher aren't the problem here.

Actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis are being dragged for penning letters of support for Danny Masterson ahead of his sentencing.

“Believe victims,” wrote Christina Ricci. “It’s not easy to come forward. It’s not easy to get a conviction.” OK, well said, but they weren’t arguing for Masterson’s innocence. They submitted a character letter ahead of his sentencing, after he’d been been convicted.

As legal experts are trying to point out, delicately, over the din, letters of support are a standard part of the sentencing process. As lawyer Scott Greenfield noted:

No one is as bad as his worst act, and letters in support at sentencing are critical to the judge fairly sentencing a deft for his crimes. That they have been made to apologize is disgraceful, both for the demand they do so and their acquiescence to this outrageous demand.

Masterson will appeal the sentence or probably get out way earlier on good behavior. But also three decades is, in fact, insane. It’s also 100% the result of the trial penalty, where if you don’t take a plea deal and insist on your constitutional right to trial you get way more time. This is bad, including when it happens to people we don’t like, such as Masterson or the Proud Boys, whose trial sentences were almost double the original plea offers.

The controversy continued, even after the actors apologized in a video that looked like their P.R. team was holding them at gunpoint. The letters “were intended for the judge to read and not to undermine the testimony of the victims or retraumatize them in any way,” Kutcher says. “We would never want to do that and we’re sorry if that has taken place.”

The mea culpa didn’t seem to work. As one woman wrote on Twitter:

Every woman you witness trying to get some form of justice for sexual violence has already had her soul crushed, her life ruined, her family destroyed, and her reputation absolutely destroyed by unwitting yet vicious enablers and defenders.

Spare us the poor perpetrator lecture.

Their response is emblematic of our entire culture’s response to violence against women, which is to say: prioritize how the perp feels, his reputation, his family. What about the victim’s ruined life, reputation, and torn apart family.

The feminist writer Jessica Valenti, too, described their letters as a thumbs up for rape culture:

The Ashton/Mila letters are disgusting on so many levels, but the absolute fucking *nerve* of praising Danny Masterson for his commitment to a drug-free lifestyle when he used drugs to incapacitate his victims!

Their support is such a good example of how rape culture works: People are happy to oppose sexual assault when it's an abstract concept, but if it means holding an individual you like accountable - all bets are off

You can't claim to care about rape if you're not willing to do anything about rapists

OK but the two actors aren't officially in charge of “doing anything about rapists,” they’re in charge of acting in dumb rom-coms. Doing something about rapists is the job of the police and the courts. And the standard clearance rate for sexual assault, nationally, is around 30.6% (Clearance rates refer to an arrest made, not even a successful prosecution).

We either go big or go home. An individual gets the book thrown at them, and then we’re like “It’s a win!” and then no virtually no structural change occurs. I hate to raise this example. But that was also true of Derrick Chauvin. What Chauvin did was monstrous. It also sparked global protests that did almost nothing to curb structure-wide police abuse. Masterson appears to have done terrible things, but I doubt police departments are about to fully staff their special victims devisions. Even in the famously well-funded NYPD, the special victims department, inspiration for the copaganda Law and Order: SVU, is so poorly staffed, relative, to say, Narcotics Units, the federal government is weighing taking over.

Controversial little distractions like Kunis and Kutcher’s P.R. flub stand in the way of change.